Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in 1821 in Moscow, in the staff quarters of the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor, where his father served as a doctor. He grew up as one of seven children, in a household ruled by severity. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1837; the following year he enrolled at the Military Engineering School in Petersburg. His father died in 1839. He completed his training as an engineer, but soon left the service, determined to live by his pen. His first published work was a translation of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet. Poor Folk, which appeared in 1846, won the praise of the critic Belinsky and made his name overnight. The rise was short-lived: in 1849 he was arrested for belonging to the Petrashevsky circle, where banned texts were read aloud. That December he was led out to the square to be shot; the execution was halted at the last moment by a decree read out on the spot. He spent four years at hard labour in Omsk; his epileptic seizures began in those years. In 1859 he returned to Petersburg and ran journals with his elder brother Mikhail. In 1864 he lost his wife and, a few months later, Mikhail; debts and a gambling habit pursued him for years. To meet a contract he dictated The Gambler in twenty-six days; the stenographer who took it down, Anna Snitkina, became his wife the following year. In Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov he tested how far an idea can carry a person, leaving the argument to his characters: whoever defends a thought and whoever demolishes it speak with equal force inside the novel. His speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880 was widely echoed. He died in Petersburg on 9 February 1881; an immense crowd followed his coffin.