Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a former army surgeon murdered, possibly by his own serfs, when Fyodor was eighteen. After military engineering training he turned to literature; in 1849 he was arrested for membership in the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group reading socialist works banned under Nicholas I. Sentenced to death, he was led before a firing squad and reprieved at the last second; the tsar's pardon, staged for maximum cruelty, had always been part of the plan. He spent four years at hard labour in a Siberian prison and six more in forced army service, returning to St Petersburg only in 1859. From that prison silence came the great novels: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), completed two months before his death. They are arguably the deepest novels of the nineteenth century — and the foundation of twentieth-century literature in any language.
All Figures
Novelist · Author of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1,821 CE – 1,881 CE
The Russian novelist who was led before a firing squad — and reprieved at the last second — and who spent the rest of his life writing about guilt, suffering and the love that survives both.
Lifetime
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