Birthday of Dostoyevsky & Vonnegut

The Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, (books by this author) born in Moscow (1821). He had just graduated from engineering school with no real prospects when he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), about a young clerk who's so poor that he lives in the corner of a dirty kitchen, spends all his time pouring his heart out in letters to the girl he loves, even though she eventually marries someone else. When he finished the novel, he gave it to some friends, and they stayed up all night reading it. At 4:00 in the morning, they pounded on Dostoyevsky's door to wake him up and tell him that he'd written a masterpiece. He later said that was the happiest moment of his life.

Poor Folk was a best-seller when it came out in 1846, and then Dostoyevsky got involved in politics. He joined a group of utopian socialists, and in 1849, the Russian government arrested him along with a group of other writers for planning to distribute political pamphlets advocating socialism and the emancipation of the serfs. They were told they'd been sentenced to death, they were led out to the firing squad, blindfolded and bound to stakes.

Dostoyevsky later wrote to his brother, "Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss [my friends] who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared our lives." Two of Dostoevsky's friends never recovered their sanity.

Dostoyevsky spent four years in a Siberian prison and went on to write many novels, including Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

It's the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., (books by this author) born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1922). He's the author of many novels, including Cat's Cradle (1963), Hocus Pocus (1990) and, most recently, Timequake (1997).

His father forced him to go to college to study biochemistry, though he wanted to be a journalist. Vonnegut said, "[College] was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for." He was failing almost all of his classes when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he jumped at the chance to join the army and get out of school.

In December of 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, and forced to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. On the night of February 13, 1945, British and American bombers attacked Dresden, igniting a firestorm that burned up the oxygen in the city and killed almost all the city's inhabitants in two hours.

It was more than twenty years later when he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, believing he has traveled to an alien planet where time does not exist. Vonnegut said it was an anti-war book. But he also said, "Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers." He has since become one of the most popular guest lecturers at universities across the country