In 1842 he married Emily von Ditmar with whom he had two sons, Fyodor and Mikhail, and three daughters, Catherine, Maria and Varvara.

On 19 July 1864, under the strain of financial obligations arising with the magazine, and suffering from a liver ailment, Mikhail collapsed after hearing that an important article was rejected by the censorship.

Fyodor Dostoevsky recalled his brother as a persistent, hard-working and energetic man, "a connoisseur of European languages and literature", and a harsh critic of his own writing.

According to Fyodor, Mikhail did not consider himself an accomplished writer, and for that reason he stopped writing fiction and concentrated on publishing activities.

[8] In the 1840s Mikhail Dostoevsky's short stories were published in Notes of the Fatherland: He translated many European literature classics, including Goethe's Reineke Fuchs and Schiller's Don Carlos.