Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (Moscow, 1821 – Saint Petersburg, 1881) was one of the great novelists of the Russian Empire and of world literature. He wrote in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Russia was undergoing a deep political, social and spiritual upheaval, and his fiction, though rooted in storytelling, takes up philosophical and religious questions. He matters because he placed the psychology of his characters at the centre of the novel, and his books are still read as explorations of the human conscience.

He was born into a family where his father worked as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. His mother, who died of tuberculosis in 1837, encouraged his love of reading, and as a child he absorbed fairy tales, legends and books by Russian and foreign writers. In 1837 he and his elder brother entered the military engineering academy in Saint Petersburg, a place he disliked, since his real interests lay in literature rather than in science or soldiering. After graduating he worked briefly as an engineer and earned money by translating.

His first novel, Poor Folk, written in the mid-1840s, opened the doors of the capital's literary circles to him. In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that discussed banned books. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian labour camp, an experience he later drew on in The House of the Dead, and then served six years of compulsory military service in exile.

Back in Saint Petersburg he turned to journalism, founding and editing magazines and writing A Writer's Diary. His major novels of maturity, among them Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, probe guilt, faith, rebellion and freedom. His characters often move between extreme ideas and contradictory passions, and the author lingers over the morbid mental states that lead to murder, humiliation and self-destruction. These books are also novels of ideas, in which philosophical and political debates take shape in concrete conflicts. Notes from Underground, published in 1864, is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Dostoevsky's life was shaped by epilepsy, which he suffered for much of his adult life and which he wove into some of his characters, and by a gambling addiction that caused severe money troubles. He travelled around Western Europe, and at times had to beg to survive, yet he eventually became one of the most widely read and admired Russian writers.

His influence is vast. Friedrich Nietzsche regarded him as the only psychologist from whom he had learned something, and his work inspired writers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Anton Chekhov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He is also linked to the emergence of existentialism and to the development of Freudian thought.