The descriptions of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's seizures are many and so are the interpretations of scholars who have attempted to explain them. Dostoyevsky himself contributed to the difficulties for he reported different symptoms at different times. At one point, early in his life, he stated: "I have all kinds of seizures."¹(p61) Gastaut's^2-3 writings on the subject offer an insight into the difficulties faced by anyone trying to understand Dostoyevsky's seizures. Gastaut² initially believed Dostoyevsky had primarily generalized seizures. Years later he returned to the subject and gave what he called an "eclectic" but not very clear explanation for Dostoyevsky's symptoms. He wrote:

Dostoevsky may have presented with both a temporal lesion of very limited magnitude and thus devoid of mental or somatic expression in the interictal periods and a constitutional predisposition to epilepsy of . . . [Full Text of this Article]