Dostoevsky's love-hate relationship with Germany

Nowhere else did the great Russian writer spend as much time outside his native country than in Germany. During Fyodor Dostoevsky's first trip abroad in 1862, at the age of 41, he went to Weimar, Berlin and Leipzig. From 1869 to 1871, he lived in Dresden; the city now has a monument to the Russian writer (photo). But Dostoevsky had a love-hate relationship with the land of Goethe and Schiller.

Dostoevsky's relationship with the Germans and Germany was ambivalent. He admired the abundant cultural wealth, and often visited the Dresden Picture Gallery, where he marveled at the Sistine Madonna (photo). On the other hand, the Germans often seemed petty, cold and foreign to him — perhaps also due to that fact that Dostoevsky did not speak German.

He had an unhappy love affair with Polina Suslova, a nihilist with whom he traveled across Germany. The writer also had a gambling addiction, and would spend hours at the roulette tables in Wiesbaden (pictured above). He almost always lost.

Three German cities — Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden and Bad Homburg — can claim to have inspired the fictitious location of Roulettenburg, described in "The Gambler." Dostoevsky remained creative as he gambled away his stakes. In Wiesbaden he wrote "Crime and Punishment," and in Baden-Baden (picture) he penned the short novel "The Gambler." There were times when he was so broke he lived solely on tea.

Dostoevsky had a penchant for German spas because he hoped the treatments would help with his many health issues. "I have never felt more comfortable in health than in this dreadful Ems," he wrote in a letter to his wife in 1875. "And of course, if I had not been in Bad Ems last summer, I would certainly have died last winter."

Fyodor Dostoevsky's influence on German culture was deep and lasting. The first German translations of his novels appeared during his lifetime, and his ideas inspired several German writers, from Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse to Alfred Döblin and Martin Walser. To this day, he is one of the most widely read Russian writers in the world.

"They call me a psychologist," Dostoevsky once wrote, adding that he actually was a realist "in the truest sense of that word. I describe the heights and depths of the human soul." He made no distinctions between nationalities in this regard, which makes the Russian writer so universal and topical.