Atheism usually appears in its most extreme state-that is, in the belief that, since there is no God, the human being must be God. This conflict can, and sometimes does, take place within a single person as well as between two characters. If there is no God, many of Dostoevski’s characters realize, then either every human being is a God or every human being is nothing at all. Perhaps most important of all the themes in his work is the belief in God versus atheism. Often throughout Dostoevski’s works, men of a higher social class, although not necessarily a very high class, interact most significantly with women who are socially inferior, usually powerless or “compromised.” The relationship takes on many different attitudes in the various works, but, in almost every case, the woman turns out to be of greater virtue or higher moral and spiritual constitution than the man who, nevertheless, from his privileged position in society, usually fares better than the woman. This conflict often is positioned generationally, and it is seldom clear whether the representative of either generation should prevail. In another prevalent dichotomy, the “man of the forties” (that is, the optimistic believer in the Enlightenment) often clashes with the “man of the sixties” (that is, the atheistic or nihilistic revolutionary). Usually, problems or actual troublemakers come from the city, or, if one leaves the provinces for the city, one may become “infected” with urban discontent and return to plague the countryside.

Petersburg with sounds and smells in Dickensian realistic fashion, as opposed to the quaint, provincial quiet of the country. Petersburg of Dostoevski’s present, contrasts with the countryside. In Dostoevski’s works, complex structures are created that introduce fundamentally antipodal constructs and that produce, among other effects, a mythologization of the antagonistic elements. The first period produced primarily shorter novels and short stories, many of which have never been translated into English the latter period is represented more by the great novels, the epithet denoting both significance and size, as well as by Dnevnik pisatelya, 1876-1877, 1880-1881 (2 volumes, partial translation as Pages from the Journal of an Author, 1916 complete translation as The Diary of a Writer, 1949), which also contains several new short stories. The seven-year hiatus in his creative output between 18 corresponds to the four years that he spent in prison and the three subsequent years during which he was banished in Siberia.

Fyodor Dostoevski’s (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) works fall into two periods that coincide with the time before his imprisonment and following it.

The crocodile dostoevsky