Europe
Dmitry Dostoyevsky
Literary Lion Cub
Since childhood, Dmitry Dostoyevsky has had to carry a weighty heritage. As the great-grandson of the famous Rus-sian writer and bearing a striking resemblance to him, Dmitry “has tried hard to be worthy of this widely recognized surname, [while trying] to be himself,” wrote Yulia Kantor, in Moscow’s liberal Izvestia.
“I’ve had very, very different kinds of experiences,” Dmitry remembered. “I was in school when Dostoyevsky was basically banned. My name, of course, has gotten mixed reactions—people would look at me apprehensively, as if they were thinking, ‘what can you expect from the great-grandson of a reactionary writer?’ ” Dmitry’s father even feared for the safety of his family and expected to be jailed for his relationship to Dostoyevsky, but the family was able to weather the Stalin era.
“What is striking as well as disconcerting about Dmitry Dostoyevsky is his unshakable certitude that he inherited many habits from his great-grandfather,” observes Kantor, such as a love of coffee and a passion for horses. Indeed, Dmitry appears to be convinced that “the genetic code is at work here.”
To the great-grandson, St. Petersburg is a constant reminder of Dostoyevsky’s life. The writer not only created a literary image of the city—rendered, for example, in Crime and Punishment—but Dostoyevsky’s brothers, who were architects, built a large “down-to-earth part” of the old capital of the Russian Empire. “I love to wander around Petersburg,” Dmitry told Kantor. “Everything here still exists in ‘the Dostoyevsky style.’ Raskolnikov’s building is nearby—and even now it is an apartment house.”
But fame carries responsibilities. As the direct descendant of a great writer, Dmitry strongly believes he has a duty to know as much about Dostoyevsky as professional literary critics, for, he concludes in French, “noblesse oblige.”
