Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a military doctor who worked at a hospital for the poor. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was fifteen. His father — a difficult, alcoholic man — was murdered by his own serfs two years later, possibly because of his brutal treatment of them. Dostoevsky was nineteen. He later told friends that this event triggered his first epileptic seizure; whether this is medically accurate, it is true that epilepsy plagued him for the rest of his life.

He trained as a military engineer but resigned his commission to write. His first novel, Poor Folk, published in 1846, was celebrated by the critic Vissarion Belinsky as the work of a major new talent. Then, in 1849, he was arrested for his association with a radical literary circle — the Petrashevsky Circle — and sentenced to death. He was led to the execution ground, bound, placed before the firing squad. At the last moment, a rider galloped up with a reprieve: the Tsar had commuted the sentences. Several of the prisoners broke down completely. Dostoevsky did not. He was sent to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp followed by compulsory military service — eight years in total before he returned to St. Petersburg.

He returned a changed man and a transformed writer. The literary project he undertook for the rest of his life — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov — is the most sustained and searching exploration of the psychology of guilt, suffering, redemption, and freedom in Western literature.