title: Adolf Eichmann

text: By 1934, Eichmann requested transfer to the "Sicherheitsdienst" (SD) of the SS, to escape the "monotony" of military training and service at Dachau. Eichmann was accepted into the SD and assigned to the sub-office on Freemasons, organising seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and creating a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organisations. He prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition, which proved to be extremely popular. Visitors included Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, and Baron Leopold von Mildenstein. Mildenstein invited Eichmann to join his Jewish Department, Section II/112 of the SD, at its Berlin headquarters. Eichmann's transfer was granted in November 1934. He later came to consider this as his big break. He was assigned to study and prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organisations. He even learned a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters. On 21 March 1935 Eichmann married Veronika (Vera) Liebl (1909–93). The couple had four sons: Klaus (born 1936 in Berlin), Horst Adolf (born 1940 in Vienna), Dieter Helmut (born 1942 in Prague) and Ricardo Francisco (born 1955 in Buenos Aires). Eichmann was promoted to SS-"Hauptscharführer" (head squad leader) in 1936 and was commissioned as an SS-"Untersturmführer" (second lieutenant) the following year. Eichmann left the church in 1937.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Nazi Germany used violence and economic pressure to encourage Jews to leave Germany of their own volition; around 250,000 of the country's 437,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939. Eichmann travelled to British Mandatory Palestine with his superior Herbert Hagen in 1937 to assess the possibility of Germany's Jews voluntarily emigrating to that country, disembarking with forged press credentials at Haifa, whence they travelled to Cairo in Egypt. There they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, with whom they were unable to strike a deal. Polkes suggested that more Jews should be allowed to leave under the terms of the Haavara Agreement, each being allowed to take £1000 with them so that they would qualify for entry to Palestine under a less restricted form of immigration. The suggestion was dismissed, Hagen giving two reasons in his report: a strong Jewish presence in Palestine might lead to their founding an independent state, which would run contrary to Reich policy; it was also against Reich policy to allow the free transferal of "Jewish capital". Eichmann and Hagen attempted to return to Palestine a few days later, but were denied entry after the British authorities refused them the required visas. Their report on their visit was published in 1982.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: In 1938, Eichmann was posted to Vienna to help organise Jewish emigration from Austria, which had just been integrated into the Reich through the "Anschluss". Jewish community organisations were placed under supervision of the SD and tasked with encouraging and facilitating Jewish emigration. Funding came from money seized from other Jewish people and organisations, as well as donations from overseas, which were placed under SD control. Eichmann was promoted to SS-"Obersturmführer" (first lieutenant) in July 1938, and appointed to the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, created in August in a room in the former Palais Albert Rothschild at Prinz-Eugen-Straße 20–22. By the time he left Vienna in May 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had left Austria legally, and many more had been smuggled out to Palestine and elsewhere.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Within weeks of the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Nazi policy toward the Jews changed from voluntary emigration to forced deportation. After discussions with Hitler in the preceding weeks, on 21 September SS-"Obergruppenführer" Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, advised his staff that Jews were to be collected into cities in Poland with good rail links to facilitate their expulsion from territories controlled by Germany, starting with areas that had been incorporated into the Reich. He announced plans to create a reservation in the General Government (the portion of Poland not incorporated into the Reich), where Jews and others deemed undesirable would await further deportation. On 27 September 1939 the SD and the "Sicherheitspolizei" (SiPo, "Security Police") – the latter comprising the "Geheime Staatspolizei" (Gestapo) and "Kriminalpolizei" (Kripo) police agencies – were combined into the new "Reichssicherheitshauptamt" (RSHA, "Reich Security Main Office"), which was placed under Heydrich's control.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: After a posting in Prague to assist in setting up an emigration office there, Eichmann was transferred to Berlin in October 1939 to command the "Reichszentrale für jüdische Auswanderung" ("Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration") for the entire Reich under Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo. He was immediately assigned to organise the deportation of 70,000 to 80,000 Jews from Ostrava district in Moravia and Katowice district in the recently annexed portion of Poland. On his own initiative, Eichmann also laid plans to deport Jews from Vienna. Under the Nisko Plan, Eichmann chose Nisko as the location for a new transit camp where Jews would be temporarily housed before being deported elsewhere. In the last week of October 1939, 4,700 Jews were sent to the area by train and were essentially left to fend for themselves in an open meadow with no water and little food. Barracks were planned but never completed. Many of the deportees were driven by the SS into Soviet-occupied territory and others were eventually placed in a nearby labour camp. The operation soon was called off, partly because Hitler decided the required trains were better used for military purposes for the time being. Meanwhile, as part of Hitler's long-range resettlement plans, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were being transported into the annexed territories, and ethnic Poles and Jews were being moved further east, particularly into the General Government.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: On 19 December 1939, Eichmann was assigned to head RSHA "Referat" IV D4 (RSHA Sub-Department IV-D4), tasked with overseeing Jewish affairs and evacuation. Heydrich announced Eichmann to be his "special expert", in charge of arranging for all deportations into occupied Poland. The job entailed co-ordinating with police agencies for the physical removal of the Jews, dealing with their confiscated property, and arranging financing and transport. Within a few days of his appointment, Eichmann formulated a plan to deport 600,000 Jews into the General Government. The plan was stymied by Hans Frank, governor-general of the occupied territories, who was disinclined to accept the deportees as to do so would have a negative impact on economic development and his ultimate goal of Germanisation of the region. In his role as minister responsible for the Four Year Plan, on 24 March 1940 Hermann Göring forbade any further transports into the General Government unless cleared first by himself or Frank. Transports continued, but at a much slower pace than originally envisioned. From the start of the war until April 1941, around 63,000 Jews were transported into the General Government. On many of the trains in this period, up to a third of the deportees died in transit. While Eichmann claimed at his trial to be upset by the appalling conditions on the trains and in the transit camps, his correspondence and documents of the period show that his primary concern was to achieve the deportations economically and with minimal disruption to Germany's ongoing military operations.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Jews were concentrated into ghettos in major cities with the expectation that at some point they would be transported farther east or even overseas. Horrendous conditions in the ghettossevere overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a lack of foodresulted in a high death rate. On 15 August 1940, Eichmann released a memorandum titled "Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt" (Reich Security Main Office: Madagascar Project), calling for the resettlement to Madagascar of a million Jews per year for four years. When Germany failed to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, the invasion of Britain was postponed indefinitely. As Britain still controlled the Atlantic and her merchant fleet would not be at Germany's disposal for use in evacuations, planning for the Madagascar proposal stalled. Hitler continued to mention the Plan until February 1942, when the idea was permanently shelved.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: From the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, "Einsatzgruppen" (task forces) followed the army into conquered areas and rounded up and killed Jews, Comintern officials, and ranking members of the Communist Party. Eichmann was one of the officials who received regular detailed reports of their activities. On 31 July, Göring gave Heydrich written authorisation to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all territories under German control and to co-ordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. The "Generalplan Ost" (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann stated at his later interrogations that Heydrich told him in mid-September that Hitler had ordered that all Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be killed. "I never saw a written order," Eichmann said at his trial. "All I know is that Heydrich told me, 'the Führer ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.'" The initial plan was to implement "Generalplan Ost" after the conquest of the Soviet Union. However, with the entry of the United States into the war in December and the German failure in the Battle of Moscow, Hitler decided that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated immediately rather than after the war, which now had no end in sight. Around this time, Eichmann was promoted to SS-"Obersturmbannführer" (lieutenant colonel), the highest rank he achieved.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: To co-ordinate planning for the proposed genocide, Heydrich hosted the Wannsee Conference, which brought together administrative leaders of the Nazi regime on 20 January 1942. In preparation for the conference, Eichmann drafted for Heydrich a list of the numbers of Jews in various European countries and prepared statistics on emigration. Eichmann attended the conference, oversaw the stenographer who took the minutes, and prepared the official distributed record of the meeting. In his covering letter, Heydrich specified that Eichmann would act as his liaison with the departments involved. Under Eichmann's supervision, large-scale deportations began almost immediately to extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka and elsewhere. The genocide was code-named Operation Reinhard in honour of Heydrich, who had died in Prague in early June from wounds suffered in an assassination attempt. Kaltenbrunner succeeded Heydrich as head of the RSHA.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann did not make policy, but acted in an operational capacity. Specific deportation orders came from his RSHA superior, Gestapo chief Müller, acting on Himmler's behalf. Eichmann's office was responsible for collecting information on the Jews in each area, organising the seizure of their property, and arranging for and scheduling trains. His department was in constant contact with the Foreign Office, as Jews of conquered nations such as France could not as easily be stripped of their possessions and deported to their deaths. Eichmann held regular meetings in his Berlin offices with his department members working in the field and travelled extensively to visit concentration camps and ghettos. His wife, who disliked Berlin, resided in Prague with the children. Eichmann initially visited them weekly, but as time went on, his visits tapered off to once a month.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Germany invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944. Eichmann arrived the same day, and was soon joined by top members of his staff and five or six hundred members of the SD, SS, and SiPo. Hitler's appointment of a Hungarian government more amenable to the Nazis meant that the Hungarian Jews, who had remained essentially unharmed until that point, would now be deported to Auschwitz concentration camp to serve as forced labour or be gassed. Eichmann toured northeastern Hungary in the last week of April and visited Auschwitz in May to assess the preparations. During the Nuremberg Trials, Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, testified that Himmler had told Höss to receive all operational instructions for the implementation of the Final Solution from Eichmann. Round-ups began on 16 April, and from 14 May, four trains of 3,000 Jews per day left Hungary and travelled to the camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, arriving along a newly built spur line that terminated a few hundred metres away from the gas chambers. Between 10 and 25 per cent of the people on each train were chosen as forced labourers; the rest were killed within hours of arrival. Under international pressure, the Hungarian government halted deportations on 6 July 1944, by which time over 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had died. In spite of the orders to stop, Eichmann personally made arrangements for additional trains of victims to be sent to Auschwitz on 17 and 19 July.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: In a series of meetings beginning on 25 April, Eichmann met with Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew and member of the Relief and Rescue Committee (RRC). Eichmann later testified that Berlin had authorised him to allow emigration of a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks equipped to handle the wintry conditions on the Eastern Front. Nothing came of the proposal, as the Western Allies refused to consider the offer. In June 1944 Eichmann was involved in negotiations with Rudolf Kasztner that resulted in the rescue of 1,684 people, who were sent by train to safety in Switzerland in exchange for three suitcases full of diamonds, gold, cash, and securities.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann, resentful that Kurt Becher and others were becoming involved in Jewish emigration matters, and angered by Himmler's suspension of deportations to the death camps, requested reassignment in July. At the end of August he was assigned to head a commando squad to assist in the evacuation of 10,000 ethnic Germans trapped on the Hungarian border with Romania in the path of the advancing Red Army. The people they were sent to rescue refused to leave, so instead the soldiers helped evacuate members of a German field hospital trapped close to the front. For this Eichmann was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. Throughout October and November, Eichmann arranged for tens of thousands of Jewish victims to be forced to march, in appalling conditions, from Budapest to Vienna, a distance of .


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: On 24 December 1944, Eichmann fled Budapest just before the Soviets completed their encirclement of the capital. He returned to Berlin, where he arranged for the incriminating records of Department IV-B4 to be burned. Along with many other SS officers who fled in the closing months of the war, Eichmann and his family were living in relative safety in Austria when the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: At the end of the war, Eichmann was captured by US forces and spent time in several camps for SS officers using forged papers that identified him as Otto Eckmann. He escaped from a work detail at Cham, Germany, when he realised that his identity had been discovered. He obtained new identity papers with the name of Otto Heninger and relocated frequently over the next several months, moving ultimately to the Lüneburg Heath. He initially found work in the forestry industry and later leased a small plot of land in Altensalzkoth, where he lived until 1950. Meanwhile, former commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss and others gave damning evidence about Eichmann at the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals starting in 1946.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: In 1948, Eichmann obtained a landing permit for Argentina and false identification under the name Ricardo Klement through an organisation directed by Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian cleric and Nazi sympathiser then residing in Italy. These documents enabled him to obtain an International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport and the remaining entry permits in 1950 that would allow emigration to Argentina. He travelled across Europe, staying in a series of monasteries that had been set up as safe houses. He departed from Genoa by ship on 17 June 1950 and arrived in Buenos Aires on 14 July.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann initially lived in Tucumán Province, where he worked for a government contractor. He sent for his family in 1952, and they moved to Buenos Aires. He held a series of low-paying jobs until finding employment at Mercedes-Benz, where he rose to department head. The family built a house at 14 Garibaldi Street (now 6061 Garibaldi Street) and moved in during 1960.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann was extensively interviewed for four months beginning in late 1956 by Nazi expatriate journalist Willem Sassen with the intention of producing a biography. Eichmann produced tapes, transcripts, and handwritten notes. The surviving audio recordings became public in 2022. Eichmann confessed that he in fact knew that millions of Jews and others were being killed: "I didn't care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether they lived or died. It was the Fuehrer's order: Jews who were fit to work would work and those who weren't would be sent to the Final Solution." Sassen asked him: "When you say Final Solution, do you mean they should be eradicated?", to which Eichmann replied: "Yes."


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The memoirs were used as the basis for a series of articles that appeared in "Life" and "Stern" magazines in late 1960. The Sassen tapes form the basis of the documentary series "The Devil's Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes" screened on Israeli television in 2022. The documentary, directed by Yariv Mozer and produced by Kobi Sitt, featured extracts of Eichmann speaking in German.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Several survivors of the Holocaust, among them Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, dedicated themselves to finding Eichmann and other Nazis. Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to him in 1953 that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed that information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954. Eichmann's father died in 1960, and Wiesenthal made arrangements for private detectives to surreptitiously photograph members of the family; Eichmann's brother Otto was said to bear a strong family resemblance and there were no current photos of Eichmann. He provided these photographs to Mossad agents on 18 February.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Lothar Hermann, a Jewish German who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938, was also instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity. His daughter Sylvia began dating a man named Klaus Eichmann in 1956 who boasted about his father's Nazi exploits, and Hermann alerted Fritz Bauer, prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West Germany. Hermann then sent his daughter on a fact-finding mission; she was met at the door by Eichmann himself, who said that he was Klaus's uncle. Klaus arrived not long after, however, and addressed Eichmann as "Father". In 1957, Bauer passed the information in person to Mossad director Isser Harel, who assigned operatives to undertake surveillance, but no concrete evidence was initially found. Bauer did not trust the German police or legal system, and feared that if he informed them, they would likely tip off Eichmann. Thus he decided to turn directly to Israeli authorities. Moreover, when Bauer called on the German government to get Eichmann extradited from Argentina, they immediately responded negatively. The government of Israel paid a reward to Hermann in 1971, twelve years after he had provided the information. German geologist Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann in the early 1950s, provided Bauer with Eichmann's address and photograph. Klammer's identity was only revealed in 2021.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Harel dispatched Shin Bet chief interrogator Zvi Aharoni to Buenos Aires on 1 March 1960, and he was able to confirm Eichmann's identity after several weeks of investigation. Argentina had a history of turning down extradition requests for Nazi criminals, so rather than filing a probably futile request for extradition, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the decision that Eichmann should be captured and brought to Israel for trial. Harel arrived in May 1960 to oversee the capture. Mossad operative Rafi Eitan was named leader of the eight-man team, most of whom were Shin Bet agents.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The team captured Eichmann on 11 May 1960 near his home on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando, Buenos Aires, an industrial community north of the centre of Buenos Aires. The agents had arrived in April and observed his routine for many days, noting that he arrived home from work by bus at about the same time every evening. They planned to seize him when he was walking beside an open field from the bus stop to his house. The plan was almost abandoned on the designated day when Eichmann was not on the bus that he usually took home, but he got off another bus about half an hour later. Mossad agent Peter Malkin engaged him, asking him in Spanish if he had a moment. Eichmann was frightened and attempted to leave, but two more Mossad men came to Malkin's aid. The three wrestled Eichmann to the ground and, after a struggle, moved him to a car where they hid him on the floor under a blanket.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann was taken to one of several Mossad safe houses that had been set up by the team. He was held there for nine days, during which time his identity was double-checked and confirmed. During these days, Harel tried to locate Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor from Auschwitz, as Mossad had information that he was also living in Buenos Aires. He was hoping to bring Mengele back to Israel on the same flight. However, Mengele had already left his last known residence in the city, and Harel had no further leads, so the plans for his capture were abandoned. Eitan told the "Haaretz" newspaper in 2008 that the team decided not to pursue Mengele as it might have jeopardised the Eichmann operation.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Near midnight on 20 May, Eichmann was sedated by an Israeli doctor who was part of the Mossad team and dressed as a flight attendant. He was smuggled out of Argentina aboard the same El Al Bristol Britannia aircraft that had carried Israel's delegation a few days earlier to the official 150th anniversary celebration of the May Revolution. There was a tense delay at the airport while the flight plan was approved, then the plane took off for Israel, stopping in Dakar, Senegal to refuel. They arrived in Israel on 22 May, and Ben-Gurion announced his capture to the Knesset the following afternoon.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: In Argentina, news of the abduction was met with a violent wave of antisemitism carried out by far-right elements, including the Tacuara Nationalist Movement. Argentina requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council in June 1960 after unsuccessful negotiations with Israel, as they regarded the capture to be a violation of their sovereign rights. In the ensuing debate, Israeli representative (and later prime minister) Golda Meir claimed that the abductors were not Israeli agents but private individuals, meaning that the incident was only an "isolated violation of Argentine law." On 23 June, the Council passed Resolution 138, which agreed that Argentine sovereignty had been violated and requested that Israel should make reparations. Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement on 3 August, after further negotiations, admitting the violation of Argentinian sovereignty but agreeing to end the dispute. The Israeli court ruled that the circumstances of Eichmann's capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents declassified in 2006 show that the capture of Eichmann caused alarm at the CIA and West German "Bundesnachrichtendienst" (BND). Both organisations had known for at least two years that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, but they did not act because it did not serve their interests in the Cold War. Both were concerned about what Eichmann might say in his testimony about West German national security advisor Hans Globke, who had coauthored several antisemitic Nazi laws, including the Nuremberg Laws. The documents also revealed that both agencies had used some of Eichmann's former Nazi colleagues to spy on European communist countries.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The assertion that the CIA knew Eichmann's location and withheld that information from the Israelis has been challenged as "ahistorical". Special investigator Eli Rosenbaum cites an unreliable 1958 CIA source which said Eichmann was born in Israel, had lived in Argentina until 1952 under the (erroneous) alias "Clemens", and was living in Jerusalem.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann was taken to a fortified police station at Yagur in Israel, where he spent nine months. The Israelis were unwilling to take him to trial based solely on the evidence in documents and witness testimony, so he was subject to daily interrogations, the transcripts of which totalled over 3,500 pages. The interrogator was Chief Inspector Avner Less of the national police. Using documents provided primarily by Yad Vashem and Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, Less was often able to determine when Eichmann was lying or being evasive. When additional information was brought forward that forced Eichmann into admitting what he had done, Eichmann would insist he had no authority in the Nazi hierarchy and was only following orders. Inspector Less noted that Eichmann did not seem to realise the enormity of his crimes and showed no remorse. His pardon plea, released in 2016, did not contradict this: "There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders", Eichmann wrote. "I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty."


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann's trial before a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court began on 11 April 1961. The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, under which he was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organisation. The trial was presided over by three judges: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak Raveh. The chief prosecutor was Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner, assisted by Deputy Attorney General Gabriel Bach and Tel Aviv District Attorney Yaakov Bar-Or. The defence team consisted of German lawyer Robert Servatius, legal assistant Dieter Wechtenbruch, and Eichmann himself. As foreign lawyers had no right of audience before Israeli courts at the time of Eichmann's capture, Israeli law was modified to allow those facing capital charges to be represented by a non-Israeli lawyer. In an Israeli cabinet meeting shortly after Eichmann's capture, Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen stated, "I think that it will be impossible to find an Israeli lawyer, a Jew or an Arab, who will agree to defend him", and thus a foreign lawyer would be necessary.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The Israeli government arranged for the trial to have prominent media coverage. Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation of the United States obtained exclusive rights to videotape the proceedings for television broadcast. Many major newspapers from all over the globe sent reporters and published front-page coverage of the story. The trial was held at "Beit Ha'am" (today known as the Gerard Behar Center), an auditorium in central Jerusalem. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth to protect him from assassination attempts. The building was modified to allow journalists to watch the trial on closed-circuit television, and 750 seats were available in the auditorium itself. Videotape was flown daily to the United States for broadcast the following day.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The prosecution case was presented over the course of 56 days, involving hundreds of documents and 112 witnesses (many of them Holocaust survivors). Hausner ignored police recommendations to call only 30 witnesses; only 14 of the witnesses called had seen Eichmann during the war. Hausner's intention was to not only demonstrate Eichmann's guilt but to present material about the entire Holocaust, thus producing a comprehensive record. Hausner's opening address began, "It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout history." Defence attorney Servatius repeatedly tried to curb the presentation of material not directly related to Eichmann, and was mostly successful. In addition to wartime documents, material presented as evidence included tapes and transcripts from Eichmann's interrogation and Sassen's interviews in Argentina. In the case of the Sassen interviews, only Eichmann's hand-written notes were admitted into evidence.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Some of the evidence submitted by the prosecution took the form of depositions made by leading Nazis. The defence demanded that the men should be brought to Israel so that the defence's right to cross-examination would not be abrogated. But Hausner, in his role as Attorney General, declared that he would be obliged to have any war criminals who entered Israel arrested. The prosecution proved that Eichmann had visited places where exterminations had taken place, including Chełmno extermination camp, Auschwitz, and Minsk (where he witnessed a mass shooting of Jews), and therefore was aware that the deportees were being killed.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The defence next engaged in a lengthy direct examination of Eichmann. Observers such as Moshe Pearlman and Hannah Arendt have remarked on Eichmann's ordinariness in appearance and flat affect. In his testimony throughout the trial, Eichmann insisted he had no choice but to follow orders, as he was bound by an oath of loyalty to Hitlerthe same superior orders defence used by some defendants in the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trials. Eichmann asserted that the decisions had been made not by him, but by Müller, Heydrich, Himmler, and ultimately Hitler. Servatius also proposed that decisions of the Nazi government were acts of state and therefore not subject to normal judicial proceedings. Regarding the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann stated that he felt a sense of satisfaction and relief at its conclusion. As a clear decision to exterminate had been made by his superiors, the matter was out of his hands; he felt absolved of any guilt. On the last day of the examination, he stated that he was guilty of arranging the transports, but he did not feel guilty for the consequences.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Throughout his cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner attempted to get Eichmann to admit he was personally guilty, but no such confession was forthcoming. Eichmann admitted to not liking the Jews and viewing them as adversaries, but stated that he never thought their annihilation was justified. When Hausner produced evidence that Eichmann had stated in 1945 that "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction", Eichmann said he meant "enemies of the Reich" such as the Soviets. During later examination by the judges, he admitted he meant the Jews, and said the remark was an accurate reflection of his opinion at the time.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The trial adjourned on 14 August, and the verdict was read on 12 December. Eichmann was convicted on 15 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organisation. The judges declared him not guilty of personally killing anyone and not guilty of overseeing and controlling the activities of the "Einsatzgruppen". He was deemed responsible for the dreadful conditions on board the deportation trains and for obtaining Jews to fill those trains. In addition to being found guilty of crimes against Jews, he was convicted for crimes against Poles, Slovenes, and Roma. Moreover, Eichmann was found guilty of membership in three organisations that had been declared criminal at the Nuremberg trials: the Gestapo, the SD, and the SS. When considering the sentence, the judges concluded that Eichmann had not merely been following orders, but believed in the Nazi cause wholeheartedly and had been a key perpetrator of the genocide. On 15 December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death by hanging.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann's defence team appealed the verdict to the Israeli Supreme Court. The appeal was heard by a five-judge Supreme Court panel consisting of Supreme Court President Yitzhak Olshan and judges Shimon Agranat, Moshe Zilberg, Yoel Zussman, and Alfred Witkon. The defence team mostly relied on legal arguments about Israel's jurisdiction and the legality of the laws under which Eichmann was charged. Appeal hearings took place between 22 and 29 March 1962. Eichmann's wife Vera flew to Israel and saw him for the last time at the end of April. On 29 May, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal and upheld the District Court's judgment on all counts. Eichmann immediately petitioned Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi for clemency. The content of his letter and other trial documents were made public on 27 January 2016. In addition, Servatius submitted a request for clemency to Ben-Zvi and petitioned for a stay of execution pending his planned appeals for extradition to the West German government. Eichmann's wife and brothers also wrote to Ben-Zvi requesting clemency. Prominent people such as Hugo Bergmann, Pearl S. Buck, Martin Buber, and Ernst Simon spoke against applying the death penalty. Ben-Gurion called a special cabinet meeting to resolve the issue. The cabinet decided to recommend to President Ben-Zvi that Eichmann not be granted clemency, and Ben-Zvi rejected the clemency petition. At 8:00 p.m. on 31 May, Eichmann was informed that the appeal for presidential clemency had been denied.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann was hanged at a prison in Ramla hours later. The hanging, scheduled for midnight at the end of 31 May, was slightly delayed and thus took place a few minutes past midnight on 1 June 1962. The execution was attended by a small group of officials, four journalists and the Canadian clergyman William Lovell Hull, who had been Eichmann's spiritual counselor while in prison. His last words were reported to be:


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Rafi Eitan, who accompanied Eichmann to the hanging, claimed in 2014 to have heard him later mumble "I hope that all of you will follow me", making those his final words.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Within hours Eichmann's body had been cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, outside Israeli territorial waters, by an Israeli Navy patrol boat.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: Eichmann's youngest son Ricardo Eichmann has said he is not resentful toward Israel for executing his father. He does not agree that his father's "following orders" argument excuses his actions and observes how his father's lack of remorse caused "difficult emotions" for the Eichmann family. Ricardo was a professor of archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute until 2020.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The trial received widespread coverage by the press in West Germany, and many schools added material studying the issues to their curricula. In Israel, the testimony of witnesses at the trial led to a deeper awareness of the impact of the Holocaust on survivors, especially among younger citizens. The trial therefore greatly reduced the previously popular misconception that Jews had gone "like sheep to the slaughter".


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: The use of "Eichmann" as an archetype stems from Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil". Arendt, a political theorist who reported on Eichmann's trial for "The New Yorker", described Eichmann in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" as the embodiment of the "banality of evil", as she thought he appeared to have an ordinary personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred. In his 1988 book "Justice, Not Vengeance", Wiesenthal said: "The world now understands the concept of 'desk murderer'. We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty." The term "little Eichmanns" became a pejorative term for bureaucrats charged with indirectly and systematically harming others.


title: Adolf Eichmann

text: In her 2011 book "Eichmann Before Jerusalem", based largely on the Sassen interviews and Eichmann's notes made while in exile, Bettina Stangneth argues instead that Eichmann was an ideologically motivated antisemite and lifelong committed Nazi who intentionally built a persona as a faceless bureaucrat for presentation at the trial. Historians such as Christopher Browning, Deborah Lipstadt, Yaacov Lozowick, and David Cesarani reached a similar conclusion: that Eichmann was not the unthinking bureaucratic functionary that Arendt believed him to be.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The Green Mile is a 1999 American fantasy drama film written and directed by Frank Darabont and based on Stephen King's 1996 novel of the same name. It stars Tom Hanks as a death row prison guard during the Great Depression who witnesses supernatural events following the arrival of an enigmatic convict (Michael Clarke Duncan) at his facility. David Morse, Bonnie Hunt, Sam Rockwell, and James Cromwell appear in supporting roles.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The film premiered on December 10, 1999, in the United States to positive reviews from critics, who praised Darabont's direction and writing, emotional weight, and performances (particularly for Hanks and Duncan), although its length received criticism. It was a commercial success, grossing $286 million from its $60 million budget, and was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Duncan, Best Sound and Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: At a Louisiana assisted-living home in 1999, elderly retiree Paul Edgecomb becomes emotional while viewing the film "Top Hat". His companion Elaine becomes concerned, and Paul explains to her that the film reminded him of events that he witnessed when he was an officer at Cold Mountain Penitentiary's death row, nicknamed "The Green Mile".


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: In 1935, Paul supervised Corrections Officers Brutus "Brutal" Howell, Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger, and Percy Wetmore, reporting to chief warden Hal Moores. Percy, the nephew of the state governor's wife, demonstrates a sadistic streak but flaunts his family connections to avoid being held accountable. He is particularly abusive towards prisoner Eduard "Del" Delacroix, breaking his fingers and killing his pet mouse, Mr. Jingles.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Paul is introduced to John Coffey, a physically imposing but mild-mannered African-American man sentenced to death after being convicted of raping and murdering two young white girls. He joins two other condemned convicts on the block: Del, and Arlen Bitterbuck, the latter of whom is the first to be executed. Meanwhile, the officers are forced to deal with psychotic new inmate William "Wild Bill" Wharton, who frequently causes trouble by assaulting the officers and racially abusing John, forcing them to restrain him in the block's padded cell on more than one occasion.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: After John heals Paul's severe bladder infection by touching him, and later resurrects Mr. Jingles, Paul gradually realizes that John possesses a supernatural ability to heal others. Suspecting that John is endowed with the power to perform divine miracles, Paul doubts whether he is truly guilty of his crimes.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: In exchange for resigning from the penitentiary and accepting a job at an insane asylum, Percy is allowed to oversee Del's execution. At the execution, Percy deliberately avoids soaking the sponge used to conduct electricity to Del's head, leading to Del suffering a gruesome and agonizing death, with John forced to feel Del's pain as well. Paul and the other officers bind and gag Percy as punishment for his actions and force him to spend a night in the padded cell. While Percy is locked away, they secretly smuggle John out of the prison so that he can use his powers to heal Warden Moores' wife Melinda of a brain tumor, saving her life. After Percy is released from the padded room, the others threaten to report him for his various acts of misconduct if his behavior continues.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: John uses his powers to "release" Melinda's affliction into Percy's brain, causing Percy to shoot Wild Bill to death. Soon after, John reveals in a vision to Paul that Wild Bill was the true culprit of the crimes for which he was wrongfully condemned, releasing his supernatural energy into Paul in the process. Having suffered a mental breakdown, Percy is committed to the same insane asylum where he had planned to work after resigning from the prison.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: After realizing that John is innocent, Paul is distraught at the thought of executing him and offers to let him go free. John tells Paul that the execution would be an act of mercy, as he views the world as a cruel place and is in constant pain from the suffering that people inflict upon each other. Mentioning that he has never seen a movie before, John watches "Top Hat" with the other officers as his last request. When he is taken to be executed, he asks not to have a hood placed over his head as he is afraid of the dark. The officers watch in sadness, visibly holding back tears as Coffey is executed. Back in the present, Paul tells Elaine that John's execution was the last that he and Brutal witnessed, as they both subsequently resigned from the prison and took jobs in the juvenile system.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Concluding his story, Paul reveals that Del's mouse, Mr. Jingles, is still alive, having been blessed with a supernaturally long life thanks to John's healing touch. He also reveals that he is now 108 years old, having been 44 at the time of John's execution. While Elaine sees Paul's long life as another of John's miracles, Paul speculates that he may have been condemned to linger on Earth and outlive all of his loved ones as a divine punishment for executing John. Paul is later shown attending Elaine's funeral and muses on how much longer he has left to live.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The film was shot at Warner Hollywood Studios, West Hollywood, California, and on location in Shelbyville, Tennessee, Blowing Rock, North Carolina and the old Tennessee State Prison. The interior sets were custom built by production designer Terence Marsh. "We tried to give our set a sense of space. A sense of history. And a sense of mystery, in a way. We chose the elongated cathedral-like windows because there is a very mystical element in this movie, a supernatural element [...] It presented us with lots of opportunities", he said. The electric chair was also a bespoke design, and was inspired by real prisons which have the device.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The film title refers to the stretch of green floor that the hallway inmates walk down before they are to be executed by electric chair.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Hanks and Darabont met at an Academy Award luncheon in 1994. Stephen King stated he envisioned Hanks in the role and was happy when Darabont mentioned his name. Hanks was originally supposed to play elderly Paul Edgecomb as well, but the makeup tests did not make him look credible enough to be an elderly man. Because of this Greer was hired to play the older Edgecomb, his final film role. John Travolta was offered the role of Paul Edgecomb but turned it down.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Duncan credited his casting to Bruce Willis, with whom he had worked on the film "Armageddon" one year earlier. According to Duncan, Willis introduced him to Darabont after hearing of the open call for John Coffey. Basketball player Shaquille O'Neal was offered the role of John Coffey but turned it down. Josh Brolin was considered for the role of William "Wild Bill" Wharton.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Morse had not heard about the script until he was offered the role. He stated he was in tears by the end of it. Darabont wanted Cromwell from the start, and after he read the script, Cromwell was moved and agreed.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The official film soundtrack, "Music from the Motion Picture The Green Mile", was released on December 19, 1999 by Warner Bros. It contains 37 tracks, primarily instrumental tracks from the film score by Thomas Newman. It also contains four vocal tracks: "Cheek to Cheek" by Fred Astaire, "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby" by Billie Holiday, "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" by Gene Austin, and "Charmaine" by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: In the United States and Canada, "The Green Mile" opened on December 10, 1999 in 2,875 theaters and grossed $18 million in its opening weekend, placing second at the box office, just behind "Toy Story 2" with $18.2 million, however, it finished first for the week with $23.9 million compared to "Toy Story 2" $22.1 million for the week. It remained at number two in its second weekend and in the top 10 for 10 weeks but never reached number one for the weekend. It went on to gross $136.8 million in the U.S. and Canada and $150 million in other territories, bringing a worldwide total of $286.8 million, against its production budget of $60 million. It was the second highest-grosser in Japan for the year with a gross of $55.3 million.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 79% based on 137 reviews, with an average rating of 6.80/10. The website's critics consensus states, "Though "The Green Mile" is long, critics say it's an absorbing, emotionally powerful experience." At Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half out of four stars, writing, "The film is a shade over three hours long. I appreciated the extra time, which allows us to feel the passage of prison months and years ... it tells a story with beginning, middle, end, vivid characters, humor, outrage and emotional release". Writing for "Entertainment Weekly", Lisa Schwarzbaum also took note of the film's length, but praised Tom Hanks' "superior" performance and Darabont's direction. "Darabont's style of picture making is well matched to King-size yarn spinning. The director isn't afraid to let big emotions and grand gestures linger", she said.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: "San Francisco Chronicle"'s Edward Guthmann thought the cinematography was "handsome", and the music was "florid and melodramatic". He added, "Darabont is such a committed filmmaker, and believes so earnestly and intensely in the stories he puts onscreen". Desson Thomson of "The Washington Post" called the storytelling "brilliant", and said "From its deceptively easygoing beginning to the heart-wrenching finale, "The Green Mile" keeps you wonderfully high above the cynical ground."


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Conversely, some critics had a less positive response. Kirk Honeycutt of "The Hollywood Reporter" opined, "By inflating the simple story with a languorous pace, pregnant pauses, long reaction shots and an infinitely slow metabolism, Darabont has burdened his movie version with more self-importance than it can possibly sustain." While complimenting the production design and soundtrack, the critic from "Timeout" magazine thought some scenes were tiresome and the film "suffers from a surfeit of plot threads and characters".


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: Writing for the BBC, Clark Collis took issue with some of the plot's unrealistic elements and thought the film was too long. David Ansen of "Newsweek" thought "The Green Mile" was weaker than Darabont's previous film, "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994). He stated, "The Green Mile" is a "lumbering, self-important three-hour melodrama that defies credibility at every turn".


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The film was released on VHS and DVD on June 13, 2000. The film earned $17.45 million in combined DVD and VHS rental revenue by June 18, 2000.


title: The Green Mile (film)

text: The Blu-ray was released on December 1, 2009. That version is now out of print. The 4K Blu-ray was released on February 22, 2022.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (, ; ; 11 November 18219 February 1881), sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed novels include "Crime and Punishment" (1866), "The Idiot" (1869), "Demons" (1872), and "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880). His 1864 novella, "Notes from Underground", is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. Numerous literary critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, "Poor Folk", which gained him entry into Saint Petersburg's literary circles. However, he was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle, that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later "A Writer's Diary", a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky's body of work consists of thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and numerous other works. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the emergence of Existentialism and Freudianism. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages, and served as the inspiration for many films.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky's paternal ancestors were part of a noble family of Russian Orthodox Christians. The family traced its roots back to Danilo Irtishch, who was granted lands in the Pinsk region (for centuries part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now in modern-day Belarus) in 1509 for his services under a local prince, his progeny then taking the name "Dostoevsky" based on a village there called Dostoïevo (derived from Old Polish "dostojnik" – dignitary).


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky's immediate ancestors on his mother's side were merchants; the male line on his father's side were priests.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In 1809, the 20-year-old Mikhail Dostoevsky enrolled in Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. From there he was assigned to a Moscow hospital, where he served as military doctor, and in 1818 he was appointed a senior physician. In 1819 he married Maria Nechayeva. The following year, he took up a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. In 1828, when his two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, were eight and seven respectively, he was promoted to collegiate assessor, a position which raised his legal status to that of the nobility and enabled him to acquire a small estate in Darovoye, a town about 150 km (100 miles) from Moscow, where the family usually spent the summers. Dostoevsky's parents subsequently had six more children: Varvara (1822–1892), Andrei (1825–1897), Lyubov (born and died 1829), Vera (1829–1896), Nikolai (1831–1883) and Aleksandra (1835–1889).


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on in Moscow, was the second child of Dr. Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevskaya (born Nechayeva). He was raised in the family home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was in a lower class district on the edges of Moscow. Dostoevsky encountered the patients, who were at the lower end of the Russian social scale, when playing in the hospital gardens.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age. From the age of three, he was read heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends by his nanny, Alena Frolovna, an especially influential figure in his upbringing and his love for fictional stories. When he was four his mother used the Bible to teach him to read and write. His parents introduced him to a wide range of literature, including Russian writers Karamzin, Pushkin and Derzhavin; Gothic fiction such as the works from writer Ann Radcliffe; romantic works by Schiller and Goethe; heroic tales by Miguel de Cervantes and Walter Scott; and Homer's epics. Dostoevsky was greatly influenced by the work of Nikolai Gogol. Although his father's approach to education has been described as strict and harsh, Dostoevsky himself reported that his imagination was brought alive by nightly readings by his parents.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Some of his childhood experiences found their way into his writings. When a nine-year-old girl had been raped by a drunk, he was asked to fetch his father to attend to her. The incident haunted him, and the theme of the desire of a mature man for a young girl appears in "The Devils", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Crime and Punishment", and other writings. An incident involving a family servant, or serf, in the estate in Darovoye, is described in "The Peasant Marey": when the young Dostoevsky imagines hearing a wolf in the forest, Marey, who is working nearby, comforts him.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Although Dostoevsky had a delicate physical constitution, his parents described him as hot-headed, stubborn, and cheeky. In 1833, Dostoevsky's father, who was profoundly religious, sent him to a French boarding school and then to the Chermak boarding school. He was described as a pale, introverted dreamer and an over-excitable romantic. To pay the school fees, his father borrowed money and extended his private medical practice. Dostoevsky felt out of place among his aristocratic classmates at the Moscow school, and the experience was later reflected in some of his works, notably "The Adolescent".


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: On 27 September 1837 Dostoevsky's mother died of tuberculosis. The previous May, his parents had sent Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail to Saint Petersburg to attend the free Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, forcing the brothers to abandon their academic studies for military careers. Dostoevsky entered the academy in January 1838, but only with the help of family members. Mikhail was refused admission on health grounds and was sent to an academy in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia).


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky disliked the academy, primarily because of his lack of interest in science, mathematics, and military engineering and his preference for drawing and architecture. As his friend Konstantin Trutovsky once said, "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than F.M. Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily; his uniform hung awkwardly on him; and his knapsack, shako and rifle all looked like some sort of fetter he had been forced to wear for a time and which lay heavily on him." Dostoevsky's character and interests made him an outsider among his 120 classmates: he showed bravery and a strong sense of justice, protected newcomers, aligned himself with teachers, criticised corruption among officers, and helped poor farmers. Although he was solitary and inhabited his own literary world, he was respected by his classmates. His reclusiveness and interest in religion earned him the nickname "Monk Photius".


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Signs of Dostoevsky's epilepsy may have first appeared on learning of the death of his father on 16 June 1839, although the reports of a seizure originated from accounts written by his daughter (later expanded by Sigmund Freud) which are now considered to be unreliable. His father's official cause of death was an apoplectic stroke, but a neighbour, Pavel Khotiaintsev, accused the father's serfs of murder. Had the serfs been found guilty and sent to Siberia, Khotiaintsev would have been in a position to buy the vacated land. The serfs were acquitted in a trial in Tula, but Dostoevsky's brother Andrei perpetuated the story. After his father's death, Dostoevsky continued his studies, passed his exams and obtained the rank of engineer cadet, entitling him to live away from the academy. He visited Mikhail in Reval (Tallinn) and frequently attended concerts, operas, plays and ballets. During this time, two of his friends introduced him to gambling.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: On 12 August 1843 Dostoevsky took a job as a lieutenant engineer and lived with Adolph Totleben in an apartment owned by Dr. Rizenkampf, a friend of Mikhail. Rizenkampf characterised him as "no less good-natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness". Dostoevsky's first completed literary work, a translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel "Eugénie Grandet", was published in June and July 1843 in the 6th and 7th volumes of the journal "Repertoire and Pantheon", followed by several other translations. None were successful, and his financial difficulties led him to write a novel.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky completed his first novel, "Poor Folk", in May 1845. His friend Dmitry Grigorovich, with whom he was sharing an apartment at the time, took the manuscript to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who in turn showed it to the renowned and influential literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky described it as Russia's first "social novel". "Poor Folk" was released on 15 January 1846 in the "St Petersburg Collection" almanac and became a commercial success.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky felt that his military career would endanger his now flourishing literary career, so he wrote a letter asking to resign his post. Shortly thereafter, he wrote his second novel, "", which appeared in the journal "Notes of the Fatherland" on 30 January 1846, before being published in February. Around the same time, Dostoevsky discovered socialism through the writings of French thinkers Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon and Saint-Simon. Through his relationship with Belinsky he expanded his knowledge of the philosophy of socialism. He was attracted to its logic, its sense of justice and its preoccupation with the destitute and the disadvantaged. However, his Russian Orthodox faith and religious sensibilities could not accord with Belinsky's admixture of atheism, utilitarianism and scientific materialism, leading to increasing friction between them. Dostoevsky eventually parted with him and his associates.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: After "The Double" received negative reviews (including a particularly scathing one from Belinsky) Dostoevsky's health declined and his seizures became more frequent, but he continued writing. From 1846 to 1848 he published several short stories in the magazine "Notes of the Fatherland", including "Mr. Prokharchin", "The Landlady", "A Weak Heart", and "White Nights". The negative reception of these stories, combined with his health problems and Belinsky's attacks, caused him distress and financial difficulty, but this was greatly alleviated when he joined the utopian socialist Beketov circle, a tightly knit community which helped him to survive. When the circle dissolved, Dostoevsky befriended Apollon Maykov and his brother Valerian. In 1846, on the recommendation of the poet Aleksey Pleshcheyev, he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, founded by Mikhail Petrashevsky, who had proposed social reforms in Russia. Mikhail Bakunin once wrote to Alexander Herzen that the group was "the most innocent and harmless company" and its members were "systematic opponents of all revolutionary goals and means". Dostoevsky used the circle's library on Saturdays and Sundays and occasionally participated in their discussions on freedom from censorship and the abolition of serfdom. Bakunin's description, however, was not true of the aristocrat Nikolay Speshnev, who joined the circle in 1848 and set about creating a secret revolutionary society from amongst its members. Dostoevsky himself became a member of this society, was aware of its conspiratorial aims, and actively participated, although he harboured significant doubts about their actions and intentions.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In 1849, the first parts of "Netochka Nezvanova", a novel Dostoevsky had been planning since 1846, were published in "Notes of the Fatherland", but his banishment ended the project. Dostoevsky never attempted to complete it.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: The members of the Petrashevsky Circle were denounced to Liprandi, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Dostoevsky was accused of reading works by Belinsky, including the banned "Letter to Gogol", and of circulating copies of these and other works. Antonelli, the government agent who had reported the group, wrote in his statement that at least one of the papers criticised Russian politics and religion. Dostoevsky responded to these charges by declaring that he had read the essays only "as a literary monument, neither more nor less"; he spoke of "personality and human egoism" rather than of politics. Even so, he and his fellow "conspirators" were arrested on 23 April 1849 at the request of Count A. Orlov and Tsar Nicholas I, who feared a revolution like the Decembrist revolt of 1825 in Russia and the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. The members were held in the well-defended Peter and Paul Fortress, which housed the most dangerous convicts.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: The case was discussed for four months by an investigative commission headed by the Tsar, with Adjutant General Ivan Nabokov, senator Prince Pavel Gagarin, Prince Vasili Dolgorukov, General Yakov Rostovtsev and General Leonty Dubelt, head of the secret police. They sentenced the members of the circle to death by firing squad, and the prisoners were taken to Semyonov Place in Saintt Petersburg on 23 December 1849. They were split into three-man groups and the first group was taken in front of the firing squad. Dostoevsky was the third in the second row; next to him stood Pleshcheyev and Durov. The execution was stayed when a cart delivered a letter from the Tsar commuting the sentence. Dostoevsky later described the experience of what he believed to be the last moments of his life in his novel "The Idiot". The story of a young man sentenced to death by firing squad but reprieved at the last moment is recounted by the main character, Prince Myshkin, who describes the experience from the point of view of the victim, and considers the philosophical and spiritual implications.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky served four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service. After a fourteen-day sleigh ride, the prisoners reached Tobolsk, a prisoner way station. Despite the circumstances, Dostoevsky consoled the other prisoners, such as the Petrashevist Ivan Yastrzhembsky, who was surprised by Dostoevsky's kindness and eventually abandoned his decision to kill himself. In Tobolsk, the members received food and clothes from the Decembrist women, as well as several copies of the New Testament with a ten-ruble banknote inside each copy. Eleven days later, Dostoevsky reached Omsk together with just one other member of the Petrashevsky Circle, the writer Sergei Durov. Dostoevsky described his barracks:


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Classified as "one of the most dangerous convicts", Dostoevsky had his hands and feet shackled until his release. He was only permitted to read his New Testament Bible. In addition to his seizures, he had haemorrhoids, lost weight and was "burned by some fever, trembling and feeling too hot or too cold every night". The smell of the privy pervaded the entire building, and the small bathroom had to suffice for more than 200 people. Dostoevsky was occasionally sent to the military hospital, where he read newspapers and Dickens novels. He was respected by most of the other prisoners, but despised by some Polish political prisoners because of his Russian nationalism and anti-Polish sentiments.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: After his release on 14 February 1854, Dostoevsky asked Mikhail to help him financially and to send him books by Vico, Guizot, Ranke, Hegel and Kant. "The House of the Dead", based on his experience in prison, was published in 1861 in the journal "Vremya" ("Time") – it was the first published novel about Russian prisons. Before moving in mid-March to Semipalatinsk, where he was forced to serve in the Siberian Army Corps of the Seventh Line Battalion, Dostoevsky met geographer Pyotr Semyonov and ethnographer Shokan Walikhanuli. Around November 1854, he met Baron Alexander Egorovich Wrangel, an admirer of his books, who had attended the aborted execution. They both rented houses in the Cossack Garden outside Semipalatinsk. Wrangel remarked that Dostoevsky "looked morose. His sickly, pale face was covered with freckles, and his blond hair was cut short. He was a little over average height and looked at me intensely with his sharp, grey-blue eyes. It was as if he were trying to look into my soul and discover what kind of man I was."


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky tutored several schoolchildren and came into contact with upper-class families, including that of Lieutenant-Colonel Belikhov, who used to invite him to read passages from newspapers and magazines. During a visit to Belikhov, Dostoevsky met the family of Alexander Ivanovich Isaev and Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva and fell in love with the latter. Alexander Isaev took a new post in Kuznetsk, where he died in August 1855. Maria and her son then moved with Dostoevsky to Barnaul. In 1856, Dostoevsky sent a letter through Wrangel to General Eduard Totleben, apologising for his activity in several utopian circles. As a result, he obtained the right to publish books and to marry, although he remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life. Maria married Dostoevsky in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857, even though she had initially refused his marriage proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his poor financial situation precluded marriage. Their family life was unhappy and she found it difficult to cope with his seizures. Describing their relationship, he wrote: "Because of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became". They mostly lived apart. In 1859 he was released from military service because of deteriorating health and was granted permission to return to European Russia, first to Tver, where he met his brother for the first time in ten years, and then to St Petersburg.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: The short story "A Little Hero" (Dostoevsky's only work completed in prison) appeared in a journal, but "Uncle's Dream" and "The Village of Stepanchikovo" were not published until 1860. "Notes from the House of the Dead" was released in "Russky Mir" (Russian World) in September 1860. "Humiliated and Insulted" was published in the new "Vremya" magazine, which had been created with the help of funds from his brother's cigarette factory.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky travelled to western Europe for the first time on 7 June 1862, visiting Cologne, Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Belgium, and Paris. In London, he met Herzen and visited the Crystal Palace. He travelled with Nikolay Strakhov through Switzerland and several North Italian cities, including Turin, Livorno, and Florence. He recorded his impressions of those trips in the essay "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", in which he also criticised capitalism, social modernisation, materialism, Catholicism and Protestantism.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: From August to October 1863, Dostoevsky made another trip to western Europe. He met his second love, Polina Suslova, in Paris and lost nearly all his money gambling in Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. In 1864 his wife Maria and his brother Mikhail died, and Dostoevsky became the lone parent of his stepson Pasha and the sole supporter of his brother's family. The failure of "Epoch", the magazine he had founded with Mikhail after the suppression of "Vremya", worsened his financial situation, although the continued help of his relatives and friends averted bankruptcy.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: The first two parts of "Crime and Punishment" were published in January and February 1866 in the periodical "The Russian Messenger", attracting at least 500 new subscribers to the magazine.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky returned to Saint Petersburg in mid-September and promised his editor, Fyodor Stellovsky, that he would complete "The Gambler", a short novel focused on gambling addiction, by November, although he had not yet begun writing it. One of Dostoevsky's friends, Milyukov, advised him to hire a secretary. Dostoevsky contacted stenographer Pavel Olkhin from Saint Petersburg, who recommended his pupil, the twenty-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Her shorthand helped Dostoevsky to complete "The Gambler" on 30 October, after 26 days' work. She remarked that Dostoevsky was of average height but always tried to carry himself erect. "He had light brown, slightly reddish hair, he used some hair conditioner, and he combed his hair in a diligent way ... his eyes, they were different: one was dark brown; in the other, the pupil was so big that you could not see its color, [this was caused by an injury]. The strangeness of his eyes gave Dostoyevsky some mysterious appearance. His face was pale, and it looked unhealthy."


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: On 15 February 1867 Dostoevsky married Snitkina in Trinity Cathedral, Saint Petersburg. The 7,000 rubles he had earned from "Crime and Punishment" did not cover their debts, forcing Anna to sell her valuables. On 14 April 1867, they began a delayed honeymoon in Germany with the money gained from the sale. They stayed in Berlin and visited the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, where he sought inspiration for his writing. They continued their trip through Germany, visiting Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. They spent five weeks in Baden-Baden, where Dostoevsky had a quarrel with Turgenev and again lost much money at the roulette table. At one point, his wife was reportedly forced to pawn her underwear. The couple travelled on to Geneva.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In September 1867, Dostoevsky began work on "The Idiot", and after a prolonged planning process that bore little resemblance to the published novel, he eventually managed to write the first 100 pages in only 23 days; the serialisation began in "The Russian Messenger "in January 1868.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair". Sofya was buried at the Cimetière des Rois ("Cemetery of Kings"), which is considered the Genevan Panthéon. The grave was later dissolved but in 1986 the International Dostoevsky Society donated a commemorative plaque.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: The couple moved from Geneva to Vevey and then to Milan before continuing to Florence. "The Idiot" was completed there in January 1869, the final part appearing in "The Russian Messenger "in February 1869. Anna gave birth to their second daughter, Lyubov, on 26 September 1869 in Dresden. In April 1871, Dostoevsky made a final visit to a gambling hall in Wiesbaden. Anna claimed that he stopped gambling after the birth of their second daughter, but this is a subject of debate.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: After hearing news that the socialist revolutionary group "People's Vengeance" had murdered one of its own members, Ivan Ivanov, on 21 November 1869, Dostoevsky began writing "Demons". In 1871, Dostoevsky and Anna travelled by train to Berlin. During the trip, he burnt several manuscripts, including those of "The Idiot", because he was concerned about potential problems with customs. The family arrived in Saint Petersburg on 8 July, marking the end of a honeymoon (originally planned for three months) that had lasted over four years.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Back in Russia in July 1871, the family was again in financial trouble and had to sell their remaining possessions. Their son Fyodor was born on 16 July, and they moved to an apartment near the Institute of Technology soon after. They hoped to cancel their large debts by selling their rental house in Peski, but difficulties with the tenant resulted in a relatively low selling price, and disputes with their creditors continued. Anna proposed that they raise money on her husband's copyrights and negotiate with the creditors to pay off their debts in installments.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky revived his friendships with Maykov and Strakhov and made new acquaintances, including church politician Terty Filipov and the brothers Vsevolod and Vladimir Solovyov. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, future Imperial High Commissioner of the Most Holy Synod, influenced Dostoevsky's political progression to conservatism. Around early 1872 the family spent several months in Staraya Russa, a town known for its mineral spa. Dostoevsky's work was delayed when Anna's sister Maria Svatkovskaya died on 1 May 1872, from either typhus or malaria, and Anna developed an abscess on her throat.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: The family returned to St Petersburg in September. "Demons" was finished on 26 November and released in January 1873 by the "Dostoevsky Publishing Company", which was founded by Dostoevsky and his wife. Although they accepted only cash payments and the bookshop was in their own apartment, the business was successful, and they sold around 3,000 copies of "Demons". Anna managed the finances. Dostoevsky proposed that they establish a new periodical, which would be called "A Writer's Diary" and would include a collection of essays, but funds were lacking, and the "Diary" was published in Vladimir Meshchersky's "The Citizen", beginning on 1 January, in return for a salary of 3,000 rubles per year. In the summer of 1873, Anna returned to Staraya Russa with the children, while Dostoevsky stayed in St Petersburg to continue with his "Diary".


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In March 1874, Dostoevsky left "The Citizen" because of the stressful work and interference from the Russian bureaucracy. In his fifteen months with "The Citizen", he had been taken to court twice: on 11 June 1873 for citing the words of Prince Meshchersky without permission, and again on 23 March 1874. Dostoevsky offered to sell a new novel he had not yet begun to write to "The Russian Messenger", but the magazine refused. Nikolay Nekrasov suggested that he publish "A Writer's Diary" in "Notes of the Fatherland"; he would receive 250 rubles for each printer's sheet – 100 more than the text's publication in "The Russian Messenger" would have earned. Dostoevsky accepted. As his health began to decline, he consulted several doctors in St Petersburg and was advised to take a cure outside Russia. Around July, he reached Ems and consulted a physician, who diagnosed him with acute catarrh. During his stay he began "The Adolescent". He returned to Saint Petersburg in late July.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Anna proposed that they spend the winter in Staraya Russa to allow Dostoevsky to rest, although doctors had suggested a second visit to Ems because his health had previously improved there. On 10 August 1875 his son Alexey was born in Staraya Russa, and in mid-September the family returned to Saint Petersburg. Dostoevsky finished "The Adolescent" at the end of 1875, although passages of it had been serialised in "Notes of the Fatherland" since January. "The Adolescent" chronicles the life of Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate child of the landowner Versilov and a peasant mother. It deals primarily with the relationship between father and son, which became a frequent theme in Dostoevsky's subsequent works.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In early 1876, Dostoevsky continued work on his "Diary". The book includes numerous essays and a few short stories about society, religion, politics and ethics. The collection sold more than twice as many copies as his previous books. Dostoevsky received more letters from readers than ever before, and people of all ages and occupations visited him. With assistance from Anna's brother, the family bought a dacha in Staraya Russa. In the summer of 1876, Dostoevsky began experiencing shortness of breath again. He visited Ems for the third time and was told that he might live for another 15 years if he moved to a healthier climate. When he returned to Russia, Tsar Alexander II ordered Dostoevsky to visit his palace to present the "Diary" to him, and he asked him to educate his sons, Sergey and Paul. This visit further increased Dosteyevsky's circle of acquaintances. He was a frequent guest in several salons in Saint Petersburg and met many famous people, including Countess Sophia Tolstaya, Yakov Polonsky, Sergei Witte, Alexey Suvorin, Anton Rubinstein and Ilya Repin.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky's health declined further, and in March 1877 he had four epileptic seizures. Rather than returning to Ems, he visited Maly Prikol, a manor near Kursk. While returning to St Petersburg to finalise his "Diary", he visited Darovoye, where he had spent much of his childhood. In December he attended Nekrasov's funeral and gave a speech. He was appointed an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, from which he received an honorary certificate in February 1879. He declined an invitation to an international congress on copyright in Paris after his son Alyosha had a severe epileptic seizure and died on 16 May. The family later moved to the apartment where Dostoevsky had written his first works. Around this time, he was elected to the board of directors of the Slavic Benevolent Society in Saint Petersburg. That summer, he was elected to the honorary committee of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, whose members included Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Paul Heyse, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leo Tolstoy. Dostoevsky made his fourth and final visit to Ems in early August 1879. He was diagnosed with early-stage pulmonary emphysema, which his doctor believed could be successfully managed, but not cured.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: On 3 February 1880 Dostoevsky was elected vice-president of the Slavic Benevolent Society, and he was invited to speak at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow. On 8 June he delivered his speech, giving an impressive performance that had a significant emotional impact on his audience. His speech was met with thunderous applause, and even his long-time rival Turgenev embraced him. Konstantin Staniukovich praised the speech in his essay "The Pushkin Anniversary and Dostoevsky's Speech" in "", writing that "the language of Dostoevsky's [Pushkin Speech] really looks like a sermon. He speaks with the tone of a prophet. He makes a sermon like a pastor; it is very deep, sincere, and we understand that he wants to impress the emotions of his listeners." The speech was criticised later by liberal political scientist Alexander Gradovsky, who thought that Dostoevsky idolised "the people", and by conservative thinker Konstantin Leontiev, who, in his essay "On Universal Love", compared the speech to French utopian socialism. The attacks led to a further deterioration in his health.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: On , while searching for members of the terrorist organisation Narodnaya Volya ("The People's Will") who would soon assassinate Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar's secret police executed a search warrant in the apartment of one of Dostoevsky's neighbours. On the following day, Dostoevsky suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage. Anna denied that the search had caused it, saying that the haemorrhage had occurred after her husband had been looking for a dropped pen holder. After another haemorrhage, Anna called the doctors, who gave a poor prognosis. A third haemorrhage followed shortly afterwards. While seeing his children before dying, Dostoevsky requested that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read to his children. The profound meaning of this request is pointed out by Frank:


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Among Dostoevsky's last words was his quotation of : "But John forbad him, saying, I have a need to be baptised of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness", and he finished with "Hear now—permit it. Do not restrain me!". His last words to his wife Anna were: "Remember, Anya, I have always loved you passionately and have never been unfaithful to you ever, even in my thoughts!" When he died, his body was placed on a table, following Russian custom. He was interred in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent, near his favourite poets, Nikolay Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky. It is unclear how many attended his funeral. According to one reporter, more than 100,000 mourners were present, while others describe attendance between 40,000 and 50,000. His tombstone is inscribed with lines from the New Testament:


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky had his first known affair with Avdotya Yakovlevna, whom he met in the Panayev circle in the early 1840s. He described her as educated, interested in literature, and a femme fatale. He admitted later that he was uncertain about their relationship. According to Anna Dostoevskaya's memoirs, Dostoevsky once asked his sister's sister-in-law, Yelena Ivanova, whether she would marry him, hoping to replace her mortally ill husband after he died, but she rejected his proposal.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky and Apollonia (Polina) Suslova had a short but intimate affair, which peaked in the winter of 1862–1863. Suslova's dalliance with a Spaniard in late spring and Dostoevsky's gambling addiction and age ended their relationship. He later described her in a letter to Nadezhda Suslova as a "great egoist. Her egoism and her vanity are colossal. She demands "everything" of other people, all the perfections, and does not pardon the slightest imperfection in the light of other qualities that one may possess", and later stated "I still love her, but I do not want to love her any more. She doesn't deserve this love ..." In 1858 Dostoevsky had a romance with comic actress Aleksandra Ivanovna Schubert. Although she divorced Dostoevsky's friend Stepan Yanovsky, she would not live with him. Dostoevsky did not love her either, but they were probably good friends. She wrote that he "became very attracted to me".


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Through a worker in "Epoch", Dostoevsky learned of the Russian-born Martha Brown (née Elizaveta Andreyevna Chlebnikova), who had had affairs with several westerners. Her relationship with Dostoevsky is known only through letters written between November 1864 and January 1865. In 1865, Dostoevsky met Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya. Their relationship is not verified; Anna Dostoevskaya spoke of a good affair, but Korvin-Krukovskaya's sister, the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, thought that Korvin-Krukovskaya had rejected him.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In his youth, Dostoevsky enjoyed reading Nikolai Karamzin's "History of the Russian State", which praised conservatism and Russian independence, ideas that Dostoevsky would embrace later in life. Before his arrest for participating in the Petrashevsky Circle in 1849, Dostoevsky remarked, "As far as I am concerned, nothing was ever more ridiculous than the idea of a republican government in Russia." In an 1881 edition of his "Diaries", Dostoevsky stated that the Tsar and the people should form a unity: "For the people, the tsar is not an external power, not the power of some conqueror ... but a power of all the people, an all-unifying power the people themselves desired."


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: While critical of serfdom, Dostoevsky was skeptical about the creation of a constitution, a concept he viewed as unrelated to Russia's history. He described it as a mere "gentleman's rule" and believed that "a constitution would simply enslave the people". He advocated social change instead, for example removal of the feudal system and a weakening of the divisions between the peasantry and the affluent classes. His ideal was a utopian, Christianized Russia where "if everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up ... If they were Christians they would settle everything". He thought democracy and oligarchy were poor systems; of France he wrote, "the oligarchs are only concerned with the interest of the wealthy; the democrats, only with the interest of the poor; but the interests of society, the interest of all and the future of France as a whole—no one there bothers about these things." He maintained that political parties ultimately led to social discord. In the 1860s, he discovered "Pochvennichestvo", a movement similar to Slavophilism in that it rejected Europe's culture and contemporary philosophical movements, such as nihilism and materialism. "Pochvennichestvo" differed from Slavophilism in aiming to establish, not an isolated Russia, but a more open state modelled on the Russia of Peter the Great.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In his incomplete article "Socialism and Christianity", Dostoevsky claimed that civilisation ("the second stage in human history") had become degraded, and that it was moving towards liberalism and losing its faith in God. He asserted that the traditional concept of Christianity should be recovered. He thought that contemporary western Europe had "rejected the single formula for their salvation that came from God and was proclaimed through revelation, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself', and replaced it with practical conclusions such as, "Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous" [Every man for himself and God for all], or "scientific" slogans like 'the struggle for survival. He considered this crisis to be the consequence of the collision between communal and individual interests, brought about by a decline in religious and moral principles.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky distinguished three "enormous world ideas" prevalent in his time: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and (Russian) Orthodoxy. He claimed that Catholicism had continued the tradition of Imperial Rome and had thus become anti-Christian and proto-socialist, inasmuch as the Church's interest in political and mundane affairs led it to abandon the idea of Christ. For Dostoevsky, socialism was "the latest incarnation of the Catholic idea" and its "natural ally". He found Protestantism self-contradictory and claimed that it would ultimately lose power and spirituality. He deemed (Russian) Orthodoxy to be the ideal form of Christianity.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: For all that, to place Dostoevsky politically is not that simple, but: as a Christian, he rejected atheistic socialism; as a traditionalist, he rejected the destruction of the institutions; and, as a pacifist, he rejected any violent method or upheaval led by either progressives or reactionaries. He supported private property and business rights, and did not agree with many criticisms of the free market from the socialist utopians of his time.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: During the Russo-Turkish War, Dostoevsky asserted that war might be necessary if salvation were to be granted. He wanted the Muslim Ottoman Empire eliminated and the Christian Byzantine Empire restored, and he hoped for the liberation of Balkan Slavs and their unification with the Russian Empire.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Many characters in Dostoevsky's works, including Jews, have been described as displaying negative stereotypes. In a letter to Arkady Kovner from 1877, a Jew who had accused Dostoevsky of antisemitism, he replied with the following:"I am not an enemy of the Jews at all and never have been. But as you say, its 40-century existence proves that this tribe has exceptional vitality, which would not help, during the course of its history, taking the form of various Status in Statu ... how can they fail to find themselves, even if only partially, at variance with the indigenous population – the Russian tribe?"


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky held to a Pan Slavic ideology that was conditioned by the Ottoman occupations of Eastern Europe. In 1876, the Slavic populations of Serbia and Bulgaria rose up against their Ottoman overlords, but the rebellion was put down. In the process, an estimated 12,000 people were killed. In his diaries, he scorned Westerners and those who were against the Pan Slavic movement. This ideology was motivated in part by the desire to promote a common Orthodox Christian heritage, which he saw as both unifying as well as a force for liberation.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian who was raised in a religious family and knew the Gospel from a very young age. He was influenced by the Russian translation of Johannes Hübner's "One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments Selected for Children" (partly a German bible for children and partly a catechism). He attended Sunday liturgies from an early age and took part in annual pilgrimages to the St. Sergius Trinity Monastery. A deacon at the hospital gave him religious instruction. Among his most cherished childhood memories were reciting prayers in front of guests and reading passages from the Book of Job that impressed him while "still almost a child."


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: According to an officer at the military academy, Dostoevsky was profoundly religious, followed Orthodox practice, and regularly read the Gospels and Heinrich Zschokke's "Die Stunden der Andacht" ("Hours of Devotion"), which "preached a sentimental version of Christianity entirely free from dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application." This book may have prompted his later interest in Christian socialism. Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Eugène Sue, and Goethe, Dostoevsky created his own belief system, similar to Russian sectarianism and the Old Belief. After his arrest, aborted execution, and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament: the only book allowed in prison. In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave." He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth."


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: In Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky revived his faith by looking frequently at the stars. Wrangel said that he was "rather pious, but did not often go to church, and disliked priests, especially the Siberian ones. But he spoke about Christ ecstatically." Two pilgrimages and two works by Dmitri Rostovsky, an archbishop who influenced Ukrainian and Russian literature by composing groundbreaking religious plays, strengthened his beliefs. Through his visits to western Europe and discussions with Herzen, Grigoriev, and Strakhov, Dostoevsky discovered the "Pochvennichestvo" movement and the theory that the Catholic Church had adopted the principles of rationalism, legalism, materialism, and individualism from ancient Rome and had passed on its philosophy to Protestantism and consequently to atheistic socialism.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky's canon includes novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, essays, pamphlets, limericks, epigrams and poems. He wrote more than 700 letters, a dozen of which are lost.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky expressed religious, psychological, and philosophical ideas in his writings. His works explore such themes as suicide, poverty, human manipulation, and morality. Psychological themes include dreaming, first seen in "White Nights", and the father-son relationship, beginning in "The Adolescent". Most of his works demonstrate a vision of the chaotic sociopolitical structure of contemporary Russia. His early works viewed society (for example, the differences between poor and rich) through the lens of literary realism and naturalism. The influences of other writers, particularly evident in his early works, led to accusations of plagiarism, but his style gradually became more individual. After his release from prison, Dostoevsky incorporated religious themes, especially those of Russian Orthodoxy, into his writing. Elements of gothic fiction, romanticism, and satire are observable in some of his books. He frequently used autobiographical or semi-autobiographical details.


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: An important stylistic element in Dostoevsky's writing is polyphony, the simultaneous presence of multiple narrative voices and perspectives. Kornelije Kvas wrote that Bakhtin's theory of "the polyphonic novel and Dostoevsky’s dialogicness of narration postulates the non-existence of the 'final' word, which is why the thoughts, emotions and experiences of the world of the narrator and his/her characters are reflected through the words of another, with which they can never fully blend."


title: Fyodor Dostoevsky

text: Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential novelists of the Golden Age of Russian literature. Leo Tolstoy admired some of Dostoevsky's works, particularly "The House of the Dead", which he saw as exalted religious art, inspired by deep faith and love of humanity. Albert Einstein called Dostoevsky a "great religious writer" who explores "the mystery of spiritual existence". Sigmund Freud ranked Dostoevsky second only to Shakespeare as a creative writer, and called "The Brothers Karamazov" "the most magnificent novel ever written". Friedrich Nietzsche called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn" and described him as being "among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life." The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky came to be at the foundation of his theory of the novel. Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky's use of Polyphony was a major advancement in the development of the novel as a genre.