Some features of Yanovsky and some family events from his life were reflected in the image of Dostoevsky's character Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky ("The Eternal Husband").
Stepan Yanovsky graduated from Moscow department (Russian: Московская медико-хирургическая академия) of S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy.
[1] In the spring of 1846, Yanovsky was contacted by a student, Vladimir Maikov (Russian: Влади́мир Ма́йков) who asked him to provide a consultation for his close friend, then 24 year old Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had complaints about dizziness and insomnia.
Their relationship became friendly, and they met weekly (at times daily) over the next 3 years, until Dostoevsky's arrest and exile for his part in the Petrashevsky Circle.
'"[4] In 1872, Dostoevsky wrote to Yanovsky a letter in which he expressed his gratitude to the doctor, the friend of his youth: "You are one of the unforgettable people, one of those who echoed sharply in my life... Because you are a benefactor, you loved me and spent your time with me, with the one who had a soul illness (now I realize this), before my trip to Siberia, where I was cured...
Dostoevsky felt sympathy towards her: he expressed regret about the lack of worthy roles for her, and promised to write a single-act comedy exclusively for her.
Researchers suggest that Dostoevsky put some of Yanovsky's characteristics, such as suspicion, hypercriticism, and jealousy, into the character of Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky,[6] a person whose sole capability was being a husband.
It was structured as a letter to Apollon Maykov and contained Yanovsky's testimonies that Dostoevsky had been suffering from epilepsy for at least 3 years prior to his departure to Siberia, though it was a mild phase and was successfully handled by medication.
He reminisced that the writer was able to quote complete chapters from the books of Pushkin and Gogol, how he valued "A Sportsman's Sketches" of Turgenev, that he knew "Oblomov's Dream", from the novel of Goncharov, by heart.