Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a doctor at a hospital for the poor. He trained as a military engineer in St. Petersburg but left the service to write. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was a success.

In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to a circle of radical intellectuals and sentenced to death. Moments before the firing squad, the sentence was changed to four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by army service. The ordeal turned him toward Orthodox Christianity and against the radical ideas of his youth. He also had epilepsy and, for years, a gambling habit that kept him in debt.

Crime and Punishment (1866) follows Raskolnikov, a poor former student in St. Petersburg who kills a pawnbroker to prove that an extraordinary man may break moral law, then breaks down under guilt. The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) followed. Some critics find his novels formless and overwrought, and his journalism showed nationalist and antisemitic views. He died in St. Petersburg in 1881.