Fyodor Dostoevsky

Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky lost his mother at fifteen and his father, a military doctor, was likely murdered by his own serfs two years later. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), earned immediate praise from the critic Belinsky, but in 1849 he was arrested for involvement with a socialist circle and sentenced to death. He stood before a firing squad before a last-second commutation sent him to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp, an experience that shattered and remade him. After his return he battled epilepsy, gambling addiction, and crushing debt while producing the novels that would define the psychological extremes of modern fiction: Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He died in St. Petersburg in 1881, mourned by tens of thousands. No novelist has gone deeper into the questions of guilt, faith, free will, and the existence of God.

In 1849, for belonging to a circle of liberal intellectuals, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death. He stood before the firing squad in the Petersburg cold, certain these were his final minutes. At the last instant a reprieve arrived. The Tsar had staged the whole execution as a lesson. Four years of Siberian prison followed.