Fyodor Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. His father was a doctor, and the family lived close to the hospital where the senior Dostoevsky worked. The neighborhood was one of the worst in Moscow and would mark the young boy, stimulating his compassion for the poor and oppressed of Russia. By the time Dostoevsky was seventeen, both his mother and father were dead. His mother died after suffering from consumption (a disease that is mentioned in Notes From Underground). His father—reportedly a very bitter, often harsh, and very domineering man—is rumored to have been murdered.

After his mother’s death, Dostoevsky was sent to a boarding school in St. Petersburg. He later entered college, where he worked toward a degree in military engineering. When he graduated in 1841, Dostoevsky received a military commission as lieutenant and stayed with the military for three years and then resigned. He did not make much money in the military, and on top of that, he developed a gambling habit that left him with little money to live on. He decided to hone his writing skills in hopes of increasing his finances, and in 1846, his first novel, Poor Folk, was published. The novel was very well received, with Dostoevsky causing quite a stir in the Russian literary world. Literary critics believed that a new star had been born. His next story, The Double (1846), however, did not do so well. The claims that Russia had given birth to another great writer began to fade.

In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to be executed before a firing squad for political activities that were deemed potentially threatening to the tsarist government. The sentence was commuted at the last minute, and Dostoevsky began a period of four years in a prison labor camp, an experience that would change his political and religious beliefs. Whereas he had once been a dreamer, he now was experiencing firsthand the cruelties that one man could inflict on another. As a result, his ideas became more conservative.

Harassed by creditors, mostly due to his gambling, Dostoevsky wrote furiously for the next few years after leaving prison. The House of the Dead (1861–1862), The Insulted and the Injured (1861), and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) renewed Dostoevsky’s reputation as a writer. But it would be Notes From Underground that would later mark the beginning of his fame. Two years later, in 1866, Dostoevsky wrote his first masterpiece, Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky had married the widow Maria Isaev in 1857, but she died seven years later. Her death, plus Dostoevsky’s financial problems, sent him into a depression. Then in 1867, he married again, this time to a young stenographer, Anna Grigorevna Snitkinaand, who typed his novel The Gambler (1867). Anna was twenty-four years younger than Dostoevsky, but their relationship proved to be a stabilizing force in the author’s life. By the time the couple had given birth to three children, Dostoevsky had become famous, both at home and abroad. He continued to write to the end of his life, which culminated with his second masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). Dostoevsky, his health weakened from epileptic seizures, died February 9, 1881, in St. Petersburg.