"Are you brave enough to choose suffering in exchange for art?" That question came into my head while searching for the best material for you, and honestly, as grotesque as it sounds, the more interesting the moral that comes out of it. For anyone bold enough to reflect on it and answer honestly, a strange puzzle of human nature may be waiting, because why would we choose suffering over peace? The subject of this piece faced exactly that question, and even went further, and I imagine some of my readers have too. He stood before a heavy choice: art or peace? But to understand the whole situation properly, we need to travel back to nineteenth-century St. Petersburg.

Considered by many one of the greatest authors in history. In his novels he explored the darkest corners of the human psyche, with a precision so faithful in its detail that psychologists rubbed their eyes in astonishment, book after book. Dostoevsky grew up in a family that valued knowledge, including literature, and so from his earliest years Fyodor was already engaging with various titles, starting with Russian authors like Nikolai Karamzin, Gogol, and the Alexander Pushkin he admired so much. His reading list also included classics like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the education in his family home, carried out by his own father, was often strict and consistent. You might ask why I'm writing here about what young Dostoevsky read, but trust me, this thread of the story begins with the young reader Fyodor precisely because it's here that his literary passion developed to the point that it stayed with him until his final days and had an enormous influence on his life.

Going back to the family for a moment, because it really matters. Fyodor's father, Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoevsky, was a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. In 1828 he received the rank of collegiate assessor, which came with hereditary nobility for the family. Not long after, the Dostoevskys acquired the Darovoe estate, where the family spent part of their time. The family's status and financial means allowed young Fyodor to receive an education that many people at the time had no access to.

The Dostoevsky family's capital and the status of its head matter a great deal to us here, because it allowed our protagonist to see the world from a somewhat different angle. He was not a man raised in poverty, though his father worked at a hospital for the poor, and as a young boy he already had contact with people in an entirely different social situation.

In January 1837, Alexander Pushkin, an author he admired so much, died, and a month later tuberculosis took someone just as close to him, his mother. Not long after, Fyodor and his brother were sent to St. Petersburg to continue their education. So as we can guess, Dostoevsky's teenage years were not the most pleasant.

That same year, Fyodor and his brother were sent to St. Petersburg so they could study there, and in 1838 Dostoevsky began at the Military Engineering School. It hardly takes much research to conclude that yes, this was a prestigious and remarkably rare education. None of it would have happened without the opportunities his family provided.

He hated that school. He felt no interest whatsoever in the exact sciences, mathematics, or military engineering in general. Despite all the hardship, and his father's later death, Dostoevsky managed to finish his studies in 1843 and began working in state service. He was assigned to the engineering department, where among other things he worked on technical drawing. He worked there for about a year.

Facing financial troubles, Fyodor Dostoevsky began taking literature more and more seriously. Already during this period he was working on Poor Folk, his first major novel. And here, for the first time in his biography, we can see a talent that, I'm quite sure, would never have surfaced without a childhood passion and a hungry devouring of literature. But back to the story.

And here we can notice something very interesting. Dostoevsky left the service before Poor Folk was finished, before it was published, and before anyone could tell him he would become a great writer. So he had no certainty at all that literature would secure his future. He had only his own conviction that he no longer wanted to spend his best years in a job he didn't want to do.

Poor Folk was finished in 1845. The manuscript then went to Nikolai Nekrasov, who read it together with Dmitry Grigorovich and later presented it to Vissarion Belinsky. The novel was published in January 1846 and brought the young Dostoevsky enormous recognition in the St. Petersburg literary world.

And here, for the first time in his biography, we can see something that matters more to me than the success itself. First came the decision, and only later came the success. It's very easy to admire a man who gave up everything once we already know that he succeeded. Dostoevsky didn't have that comfort. At the moment he was leaving the service, he didn't know whether anyone would ever read Poor Folk, didn't know whether he would become a writer, and didn't even know whether he would be able to support himself through literature.

Later on, starting from what we've just described, our protagonist would have plenty of ups and downs in his career, financial ones at first, and later even ones in which he is literally sentenced to death, but that's a story for another time. What matters most, though, is just how much his life story is shaped by passion and love for his own art, which was literature. We can say with certainty that for it he was willing to endure suffering, hardship, and truly everything that comes worst.

So what's the point? Why did he choose his career blindly, not being 100% sure of it, quitting his job and finally devoting himself to literature? With this many questions we run into precisely that puzzle of human nature.

And here is where, for me, the most interesting part of the whole story begins. Because if we look at Dostoevsky's life from today's perspective, it's easy to turn him into a man who simply dared to bet everything on his passion. Except that back in 1844 he himself had no way of knowing that a few decades later his name would be known around the world.

He didn't know he would write Crime and Punishment. He didn't know that The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov would come to exist. He didn't even know whether literature would actually give him the life he wanted.

At that moment his situation was much simpler. He had an engineering education, a military rank, and a job in state service. At the same time he was working on his first piece. In August 1844 he decided to leave the service while his first novel was still a work in progress. So he had no success yet to confirm that he'd made the right decision.

And this matters more to me than the simple story of a man who just quits a safe job for art. Because he didn't yet know whether art would accept him.

Poor Folk wasn't finished until 1845. The manuscript then went to Nikolai Nekrasov, who read it together with Dmitry Grigorovich and later presented it to Belinsky. That was the moment the young writer first found himself at the center of the St. Petersburg literary world. The book itself came out in 1846.

So the chronology here matters a great deal. First a person has to decide, and only afterward does he find out whether he was right. It's very easy to look at Dostoevsky through the lens of who he later became and assume his decision was obvious. Today we know he was one of the most important writers in history. He didn't know that.

Dostoevsky, after all, couldn't look ahead at his own future life. He didn't know what the next book, the next year, or the next decade would bring. All he could know was that there existed something he wanted to do more than being an engineer.

And I think this is where I start to understand why a person would choose the harder thing, and it seems to me the reason isn't some kind of masochism, because that would be too simple an answer. Most likely a person chooses something they consider worth the price, but only later do they find out what that price will actually be.

And even more than that, I think this is exactly why art is such a strange part of human life. It doesn't offer us particularly good guarantees. You can spend years writing a book and no one will read it. You can paint your whole life and never be recognized. You can devote an enormous part of your time to music, literature, or any other form of art and still have no certainty that anyone will consider your work good. And yet people do it anyway. Dostoevsky himself would go on to do it many more times. His life didn't become easier after that decision. Quite the opposite. The years that followed brought him enormous financial troubles, imprisonment, exile to Siberia, illness, and further personal tragedies. And despite all that, literature never disappeared from his life.

And maybe this is where the answer to the question from the beginning starts to emerge. We don't choose suffering instead of peace. We choose something that makes suffering bearable.

That sounds a little absurd written out like this, but the longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that this is how many human passions actually work. An athlete endures pain for their discipline. A musician repeats the same passage hundreds of times. A writer sits alone at a desk for hour after hour, correcting a sentence that may never matter to anyone. From the outside you might ask why, but for the person doing it, the question might be a little different. Because what else would I even do instead? And I think that's the difference.

Peace on its own isn't always a sufficient reason to choose a given life. You can have money, stability, comfort, and still feel that something important has been set aside for later. You can also choose a harder life and, after a while, discover that the hardship was itself part of the price for being able to do the thing you considered truly your own.

I don't know whether Dostoevsky thought about it in exactly these terms back in 1844. We have no right to put such thoughts in his head. What we do know is that he left the service before his first novel was published, and that during that same period literature was taking up more and more of him. We also know from his correspondence that he wanted to devote himself to writing.

And honestly, I don't like calling decisions like this "courage," because courage suggests a person knows what they're afraid of and goes ahead anyway. But the problem is that sometimes a person simply can no longer pretend to themselves that they want something else.

Fyodor had an engineer's career ahead of him, and literature was still something uncertain. And yet more and more of his life kept belonging to writing. I don't know if I'd call that peace. But it may have been his own particular way of living.

So when I look today at someone who chooses their art, their passion, or anything else that truly means something to them, I find myself less and less interested in the question of whether they're brave enough. I'm more interested in an entirely different direction.

How much of our own life are we willing to give up for the one thing without which we don't want to live that life at all?

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky was published between 1879 and 1880 as his final novel and, in my opinion, the best work he ever wrote. It can be a demanding read, especially if you are new to Russian literature, but it gives you almost the complete Dostoyevsky experience in one book.

The story follows the Karamazov family and a murder that brings their faith, guilt and doubts to the surface. It is a long book, but I think it is worth taking your time with. If you have already read Crime and Punishment, this is the next book I would read.

I probably don't need to say that replying to this email is something I very much encourage. Feel free to write your thoughts, I promise I'll read and respond to every one of them.

Until Sunday.