![]() ![]() It was nearly unheard of to make a living from literary fiction. It would remain stagnant for the next 15 years.ĭostoevsky’s decision to renounce his estate to become a writer was, by any reasonable estimate, absurd. While the annual number of books published in Russia had tripled in the first third of the 19th century, by 1837 the growth had ceased. Under Nicholas’s reign, the silences rippled outward. Hundreds of thousands of people lived through a disaster that consumed the capital, and it was as if it had never happened. There was not a single reference to Petersburg’s flood of 1824 in any Russian newspaper. Russian censorship had long created eerie silences. Enterprising censors rewrote questionable passages themselves. Warier censors anticipated how an irate superior or a skittish high-ranking noble might react to any particular article or phrase. Editors were sometimes incarcerated for violations, as were overly permissive censors. Censors pored over each issue before it could be printed, which made timely issues difficult and newspapers almost impossible. Every new periodical required state approval, which could take years. He outlawed German philosophy altogether.ĭomestic journalism was hamstrung. Nicholas shut down a newspaper for publishing an unfavorable review of a play he quite liked. Censors worried about secret codes hidden in musical scores, and phrases like “forces of nature” and “intellectual ferment” were unacceptably inflammatory. International tourists had to forfeit their books and wait, sometimes for days, for the Foreign Censorship Committee to clear them. The “Black Office” reviewed foreign periodicals arriving by mail. More than a dozen censorship offices in different ministries inspected virtually all printed material, and the list of banned books was updated monthly. Nicholas expanded the dragnet for dangerous words almost immediately after his coronation. Nicholas’s regime considered virtually all secular literature hostile to orderly society. This was particularly difficult to do because another key to Nicholas’s control of Russia was his control over literature and the circulation of ideas. Becoming a writer meant resisting the city’s ratIonal order. Dostoevsky was 23 years old, unemployed and aimless in a city dominated by the military, the bureaucracy, and rank. ![]()
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