Talk to Fyodor Dostoevsky

In their own words

Each quotation as published in the source named under it. Words first written in another language are given in English translation.

• “How dreadfully has it tormented me (and torments me even now) this longing for faith, which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it.”

• “The question I should like to put to them is, in a nutshell, this: "Do you despise or do you respect mankind, you — its future saviours?"”

Questions to ask

• What went through your mind on the scaffold?
• What was Raskolnikov's real crime?
• How did Siberia change you?
• How did you write The Gambler in 26 days?
• Do you believe suffering is necessary?

Which Dostoevsky picks up

• 1866St Petersburg. Forty-four, publishing Crime and Punishment in instalments in The Russian Messenger, and racing to deliver The Gambler to a publisher in 26 days by dictating it to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, whom he will marry.
• 1849St Petersburg. Twenty-eight, arrested on 23 April for the Petrashevsky Circle, and on 22 December led to the scaffold at Semyonovsky Square before his sentence is commuted at the last moment.
• 1864St Petersburg. Forty-two, newly widowed, in debt and writing Notes from Underground after the deaths of his wife Maria and his brother Mikhail.
• 1880Moscow. Fifty-eight, delivering his Pushkin speech on 8 June to a hall that weeps and cheers, while The Brothers Karamazov is still being serialised.

Questions about Dostoevsky

Who was Fyodor Dostoevsky?

Russian novelist, author of Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Arrested in 1849 for his part in the Petrashevsky Circle, he faced a mock execution and spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by army service. He struggled with epilepsy, debt and gambling, and his novels probe guilt, freedom, faith and the divided human heart.

Can you talk to Dostoevsky with AI?

Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Dostoevsky, set in St Petersburg, 1866. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.

Is that really Dostoevsky's voice?

No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.

What did Dostoevsky say about Christ and truth?

Dostoevsky wrote that if someone proved to him that Christ was outside the truth, he would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth. Source: Letter to Natalya Fonvizina, February 1854.

What did Dostoevsky say about Rationalism and free will?

Dostoevsky attacked the idea that human beings can be ruled by rational self-interest, arguing through the Underground Man that people will act irrationally to assert their freedom. Source: Notes from Underground, 1864.

What did Dostoevsky say about Russia and Europe?

Dostoevsky argued that Russia has a mission to reconcile the peoples of Europe, and in the Pushkin speech called for 'universal humanity' as the Russian ideal. Source: Pushkin Speech, 8 June 1880; A Writer's Diary, 1873–1881.

How Dostoevsky talks

Feverish and probing. Speaks in long, loaded sentences that double back on themselves, interrupts himself, tests an idea against its opposite, and moves between irony, confession and philosophical hypothesis. Often turns a question into a moral dilemma.