Dale Quarrington

Dostoevsky’s Epilepsy

There are a vast array of misconceptions within the commonly perceived biography of Dostoevsky. This fourth essay, in particular, will deal with Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. Specifically, this essay will be divided into three parts. The first part will deal with the confusion surrounding the origins of Dostoevsky’s initial symptoms and whether it first began to show signs in his childhood or not. This will include what many biographers mistakenly believe to go as far back as 1831. The second part will deal with the time that Dostoevsky’s epilepsy first did in fact begin to show signs. Unlike what is commonly believed, Dostoevsky did not have his first episode while waiting to be executed; rather, it was during his prison years spent in Siberia that it fully developed. And the third and final part will deal with the actual symptoms of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, as well as a detailed description of his illness. All three parts will help to further clarify the confusion surrounding Dostoevsky’s life and, in particular, the origins and symptoms of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy.

The exact origins of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy are difficult to specifically pinpoint. This is particularly the case when concerning both his childhood and young adulthood, and whether there’s any early evidence that points towards his later illness. Unfortunately, the answer to this question has to be an unambiguous no. The greatest evidence that points towards Dostoevsky not having epilepsy is through absence and omission. While at the Academy of Engineers, while living with hundreds of other students in a dormitory style living space, there is not one single eye witness account that highlights any of Dostoevsky’s epileptic symptoms. Under such living arrangements, where information would have passed freely between students, not one source of eye witness information exists to suggest the early stages of what would later become epilepsy. The only evidence at all about any persistent illness in childhood comes from Dostoevsky himself, in his “Diary of a Writer.” One day, in the spring of 1833, Dostoevsky was traveling through a forest on the families property, when suddenly Dostoevsky believed himself to have heard, “A Wolf is on the loose!” Seized by panic, Dostoevsky rushed out of the forest, and into an open field, where one of the local peasants was working the land. While this would become the basis for one of Dostoevsky’s central philosophical works, “A Peasant Marey,” it was also the only information that records any nervous ailment in his childhood. Yet, as much as people may want to ascribe meaning to this auditory hallucination as the origins of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, it seems more likely than not that the hallucination stemmed from a nervous disorder, and not epilepsy. This is corroborated twelve years later by a friend of Dostoevsky’s at the Academy; Grigorovich. After the acclaim, and subsequent persecution of his work, “Poor Folk,” Dostoevsky nerves seem to have finally given way under the stress. In January of 1845, Dostoevsky collapsed in the streets while out on a walk, just after a funeral procession had passed the two friends by. Grigorovich writes:

The unflagging work and totally sedentary life seriously damaged his health; they aggravated his illness, which had sometimes shown up in his youth during his stay at the Academy. (JF1 164)

Regrettably, this is the only eyewitness account to Dostoevsky’s health at this time. Yet, Grigorovich speaks to the collapse as an aggravation of earlier symptoms. It can therefore be understood that these attacks were from fainting, and not momentary loss of consciousness, which is commonly associated with an epileptic attack.

Yet, as severe as this attack was for Dostoevsky, in January of 1845, Dostoevsky’s health continued to steadily deteriorate all the way up to the spring of 1846. Concerned for Dostoevsky’s health, Valerian Maikov – a friend of Dostoevsky’s – suggested that he consult Dr. Stepan Yanovsky; a young medical man just then establishing his practice. Yanovsky’s reports are an important source on Dostoevsky’s health during the mid-1840’s. The frequency of Dostoevsky’s “hallucinations” at this time were ever increasing. And every time Dostoevsky suffered a “hallucination,” he was afraid that this was a sure sign of an oncoming fainting fit. Dostoevsky later described these fainting fits two years before he was to be sent off to Siberia, when he described them to Vsevolod Solovyev:

…at the time of my various literary difficulties and quarrels, I was the victim of some sort of strange and unbearably torturing nervous illness. I cannot tell you what these hideous sensations were, but I remember them vividly; it often seemed to me that I was dying, and the truth is – real death came and then went away again.
(JF1 167)

One thing specifically must be taken from this quote: Dostoevsky remembered these attacks “vividly.” At no time was there ever a loss of consciousness. In fact, Dostoevsky is able to describe these nervous attacks in great depth and detail. In his novel The Insulted and Injured, a novel which contains large portions of autobiographical material, Dostoevsky describes an impoverished narrator who writes:

I gradually began at dusk to sink into that condition which is so common with me now at night in my illness, and which I call mystic terror. It is a most oppressive, agonizing state of terror of something that I cannot define, something ungraspable and outside the natural order of things, but which may yet take shape this very minute, as though in mockery of all the conclusions of reason, and come to me and stand before me as an undeniable fact, hideous, horrible, and relentless. This fear usually becomes more and more acute, in spite of all the protests of reason, so much so that although the mind sometimes is of exceptional clarity at such moments, it loses all power of resistance. It is unheeded, it becomes useless, and this inward division intensifies the agony of suspense. It seems to me something like the anguish of people who are afraid of the dead. But in my distress the indefiniteness of the apprehension makes my suffering even more acute.
(JF1 167)

This description outlines a lot of things. But the most important thing to be taken from this quote is Dostoevsky’s use of the word “acute.” Dostoevsky is acutely aware enough to illustrate a moment when his nervous disorder takes hold. He can accurately point towards the divide in the personality between the operations of his rational mind, and the helplessness of the overpowering strength of his irrational apprehension. Yet, as startling as these attacks may seem at first, they are made even more shocking by the fact that Dostoevsky was always conscious of these nervous attacks as they occurred. Whereas, with his epileptic attacks, Dostoevsky would always lose consciousness. For these three reasons it would seem unlikely, but not impossible, that Dostoevsky did not suffer from epilepsy in his childhood and young adulthood.

It seems most likely that Dostoevsky first suffered a direct attack of epilepsy sometime in 1850. It would seem, with an already fragile mental disposition, Dostoevsky’s nervous ailment was irreparably harmed when he was forced to experience a mock trial and execution, followed by prison life, and the constant terror caused by corporal punishment while imprisoned. And while it is more wishful and romantic to believe that any one of these three were the direct cause of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, it is more likely that they had an indirect effect on his already fragile nerves. Thus, the combination of both stress and nerves seem the most plausible cause of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy.

In a medical report written seven years after Dostoevsky’s incarceration a doctor on staff at the prison wrote that Dostoevsky’s symptoms were marked by shrieks, loss of consciousness, convulsive movements of face and limbs, foam at the mouth, raucous breathing, and a feeble, rapid, and irregular pulse. In the same report, it is further stated that Dostoevsky suffered s similar attack sometime in 1853. And ever since 1853, Dostoevsky suffered from similar seizures on an average of one a month. (JF1 167).

In a letter to his brother, Mikhail, in the only first hand account available, Dostoevsky speaks of his epilepsy as an entirely new phase of his old nervous ailment. While, in Dostoevsky’s opinion, the symptoms may have been pre-existing, it is not until his time spent in Siberia that they fully developed. And this is exactly how he describes it to his friend, Baron Wrangel, a year or two after he had written the original letter of his epilepsy to his brother. In it, he describes the first signs of his illness, and how they first appeared in Petersburg, but developed fully while in prison in Katorga. And with respect to all his medical history concerning his nervous ailment, Dostoevsky could not consider his epilepsy entirely unexpected. However, it must be noted, that Dostoevsky himself alludes to the fact that his seizure while in Siberia was an affliction, of which, he had not yet experienced.

Two years after his release from prison, but still while serving his sentence in the service of the Russian army, Dostoevsky communicates his increasing concerns over his epilepsy. At first, in a letter dated November 9th, 1856, Dostoevsky’s concerns seem rather mild; mainly focusing on his inability to write. “So far as the fits are concerned, they continue. When I think them ended, they being again. Each time they cause courage to sink, and I feel that because of them I lose my memory and my abilities” (JF2 212). But in a later letter, to Baron Wrangel, Dostoevsky’s concerns have seemed to intensified. The severity of his epilepsy had even surprised him.

If I wish to return to Russia it would be solely to embrace those I love, and to see qualified doctors so as to know what my illness is [epilepsy], what these attacks are which always keep recurring, and which each time weaken my memory and all faculties and which, I fear, may one day lead me to madness.
(JF2 212).

Dostoevsky is being fully forthright with an illness he could not predict the outcome of. While he had seen doctors before about his nervous ailment, he had not, as yet, sought proper treatment for his new disease. It is this newness of his epilepsy, and not the familiarity with his old ailment, that had roused such a response. And for this reason, it seems most plausible that the illness surfaced sometime after his internment in a Siberian prison, and not before, while living in Petersburg.

Now that the origin, and confusion surrounding Dostoevsky’s epilepsy have been clarified, it is time to describe, in detail, the full extent of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. But before one specifies exactly what Dostoevsky’s epilepsy consisted of, perhaps it’s better to speak more generally of what epileptic symptoms are; for clarities sake. Epilepsy, clinically speaking, is the overloading of the brain with stimuli to the point of convulsion. With this said, we can speak more specifically about Dostoevsky’s exact symptoms, as they pertain to his epilepsy. The greatest account of Dostoevsky’s illness comes from his own pen. In a famous scene from The Idiot, Dostoevsky gives an obviously autobiographical account of an epileptic attack to the protagonist of the novel; Prince Myshkin, who like Dostoevsky, suffers from epilepsy. In the passage, Dostoevsky gives a vivid account of his aura like epileptic attacks.

…his mind and heart were flooded with extraordinary light, all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his anxieties were relieved at once; they were all merged in a lofty calm, full of serene, harmonious joy and hope, full of knowledge and the ultimate causes of things.
(D 237)

Such moments instilled “a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of completeness, of proposition of reconciliation, and of ecstatic devotional merging in the highest synthesis of life” (D 237). And later, in the same passage we learn even more about Prince Myshkin’s epileptic attacks that

…had [he] actually said to himself at that second, that, for the infinite happiness he had felt in it, that second really might be worth the whole of life…something to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.
(D 238)

With these words, Dostoevsky is able to convey the idea of the ecstatic heightening of consciousness that swept over his entire being at the beginning of his seizures, in a state of wakefulness. Notably, a majority of Dostoevsky’s attacks occurred mercifully in the early morning hours, while he was still lightly sleeping. But when fully aware of his attack, Dostoevsky would describe the sensation of being outside himself. Where he was limitlessly fused to the infinitude of the universe. And this fusion was farther highlighted by the transcendence of time, but more exactly, by the dissolving of time for the feeling of an overwhelming happiness and union with the eternal. For Dostoevsky, what best describes the aura of the attack right before the epileptic attack itself was an indescribable bliss in being united, personally, with the intimacy of the eternal. Yet, all Dostoevsky is able to describe is what happens the moment before an epileptic attack. He is unable to describe the epileptic attack itself, like he had with his pre-existing nervous ailment. The best description of these epileptic attacks come from his friend Strakhov, in 1863. While having a heated discussion over the existence of God, with Strakhov, when suddenly Dostoevsky “…broke off, as in search of words, and then, uttering a strange and high-pitched wail, lost consciousness and collapsed” (JF2 196). After an attack itself, Dostoevsky would be plunged into the darkest depression, and deepest of despairs, where he was constantly racked by headaches and confusion of thought. Yet, as bad as Dostoevsky was mentally, he kept writing, forced by his financial predicaments.

Particularly, from Dostoevsky’s own personal account, as well as from Strakhov’s eye-witness account, a plausible diagnosis of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy has been put forth. It is commonly believed that Dostoevsky suffered from psychomotor-temporal lobe epilepsy. This belief is supported by Jacques Catteau, in his ground-breaking medical examination of Dostoevsky’s illness, in his book La creation litteraire chez Dostoievski. It is further supported by Joseph Frank, in his five part biography on Dostoevsky, in the second volume Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859. In this work, Frank seeks the aid of one Dr. Gilbert H. Glaser, a professor of neurology at Yale University School of Medicine. Both books help to support the type of epilepsy that Dostoevsky suffered from. Both books believe Dostoevsky suffered from psycho-motor-temporal lobe epilepsy. This specific type of epilepsy frequently finds its origins as a local organic lesion of the brain. This type is then distinguished from a more primary and generalized epilepsy, where there is usually no specific cause assigned. Psychomotor-temporal lobe epilepsy was first diagnosed in the 1940’s with the advancement of research of the brain. Up until then, very little was actually known about this type of epilepsy. But since that time, Dostoevsky’s symptoms, specifically concerning his “ecstatic aura” have helped to confirm such a diagnosis to be the right one.

In conclusion, this fourth essay has attempted to clarify the misconceptions surrounding Dostoevsky’s biography, while specifically focusing on the issue of his epilepsy. At first, it was shown how a childhood nervous ailment was not epilepsy, but at most, only an early indicator of what would come health wise for Dostoevsky. Instead, it is more than likely than not that, his epilepsy did develop while he was in prison, and while also in service of the Russian military after his internment. And lastly, a greater amount of information was given on the specific diagnosis of what Dostoevsky’s epilepsy might have been. Hopefully, in the end, this essay has shed a greater amount of light on Dostoevsky’s biography, as well as into Dostoevsky’s epilepsy.

Resources

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. New York: Oxford Classics, 1998.

2. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1841. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977.

3. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.

4. Catteau, Jacques. La Creation Litteraire Chez Dostoievsky. Paris: 1978.