There was little in the childhood of Fyodor Mihaylovich Dostoevski to presage his achievements as a writer of world-famous novels. Born into a middle-class family of few cultural pretensions, he received a mediocre education. His father, a physician at a Moscow hospital for the poor, ruled the family with a strict hand and enforced observance of Russian Orthodox ritual at home. When Dostoevski entered the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School in 1838, he found himself unprepared for academic life; nevertheless, he enjoyed his first exposure to literature and soon immersed himself in it. The elder Dostoevski’s murder at the hands of his serfs (he had in the meantime become a modest landowner) and the first signs of his own epilepsy upset Dostoevski’s academic routine, delaying his graduation until 1843.

Dostoevski worked only briefly as a military engineer before deciding to pursue a literary career. When the efforts of acquaintances resulted in the publication of his first fictional work, Poor Folk, his excitement knew no bounds, and he envisioned a promising writing career. His initial success led easily to publication of several additional pieces, among them the uncompleted Netochka Nezvanova and the psychologically impressive The Double. While these works are not considered primary by Dostoevski scholars, they hint at what was to become the author’s fascination with humankind’s ambiguous inner world.

The perfecting of this artistic vision was interrupted by Dostoevski’s encounter with the realities of czarist autocracy under Nicholas I. Dostoevski was active in the Petrashevsky Circle, one of many dissident groups engaged in underground dissemination of sociopolitical pamphlets. Dostoevski’s arrest and death sentence in 1849, commuted at the last moment to prison and exile, initiated a terrible period for the young author. On Christmas Eve of that year, he left St. Petersburg in chains to spend four years in the company of violent criminals in Omsk, Siberia. The inhuman conditions of his imprisonment severely taxed his mental stability, especially because he was forbidden to write or even read anything, except religious matter. He later recorded these experiences graphically in The House of the Dead (initially translated as Buried Alive: Or, Ten Years of Penal Servitude in Siberia), immediately catching public attention for his psychological insight into pathological and criminal behavior. He spent an additional five years (1854-1859) as a political exile in a Siberian army contingent.

In 1857, after recovering somewhat from the ravages of incarceration, which had exacerbated his epilepsy, Dostoevski married a widow, Maria Isayeva, and hesitantly resumed his writing career. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in 1859, he was drawn into a hectic pace of literary activity. Turgenev and Tolstoy occupied first place among writers, leaving the unfortunate ex-convict to rebuild his career almost from scratch. To facilitate the serial printing of his work, he ventured into publishing. Together with his brother Mikhail, he started the journal Vremya in 1861, using it as a vehicle to publish his not very successful novel The Insulted and Injured, which he had written primarily to alleviate financial pressures. When he visited Western Europe for the first time in 1862, his observations also appeared in Vremya as “Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh” (1863; “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” 1955). Before he could reap substantial material benefit from his enterprise, government censors closed the magazine in 1863 because a politically sensitive article on Russo-Polish affairs had appeared in its pages.

At this inopportune moment, Dostoevski indulged himself somewhat recklessly by revisiting Europe on borrowed funds in order to pursue a passionate love interest, Apollinaria Suslova, and to try his luck at German gaming tables. Unsuccessful in both pursuits, he returned to Russia in 1864 to risk another publishing venture, the periodical Epokha, which folded in less than a year, though he managed to print in it the initial installments of his first successful longer fiction, Notes from the Underground, before its demise. His personal life, too, did not proceed smoothly. The deaths of his wife, with whom he had shared seven unhappy years, and of his brother and business partner Mikhail in 1864 brought enormous additional debts and obligations, which led him to make hasty promises of future works. To extricate himself from one such contract, he interrupted work on Crime and Punishment and hastily put together a fictional version of his gambling experiences and his torrid love affair with Suslova. To speed the work, he dictated the text to a twenty-year-old stenographer, Anna Snitkina. With her expert help, The Gambler was delivered on time. Dostoevski and Snitkina married in 1867, and she is generally credited with providing the stability and emotional security that permitted the author to produce his last four novels at a more measured pace.

Despite the success of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevski still ranked below Turgenev and Tolstoy in popular esteem by the end of the 1860’s, partly because their wealth allowed them leisure to compose carefully edited works that appealed to the public and their gentry status opened influential doors, and partly because Dostoevski’s writings were uneven, alternating between strange psychological portraits and journalistic polemics, all produced in a frantic haste that seemed to transmit itself to the text. Dostoevski spent the first four years after his marriage to Snitkina in Europe, largely to escape creditors but also to feed his gambling mania, which kept the family destitute. He completed The Idiot abroad and accepted a publisher’s large advance in 1871 to facilitate return to his homeland. His remaining ten years were spent in more rational pursuits.

Between 1873 and 1874, he edited the conservative weekly Grazhdanin and initiated a popular column, Diary of a Writer, which in 1876 he turned into a successful monthly. The appearance of the politically provocative The Possessed and of A Raw Youth kept him in the public eye, and he was finally accorded some of the social acknowledgments previously reserved for his rivals Turgenev and Tolstoy. The duality of his writings, at once religiously conservative and brilliantly innovative, made him acceptable to government, Church, and intellectuals alike. This philosophical dichotomy remained characteristic of Dostoevski to the end. In 1880, he delivered an enthusiastically received speech during the dedication of the Alexander Pushkin monument in Moscow, in which he reiterated patriotic sentiments of a rather traditional tenor. At the same time, his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, expressed doubts about a single, traditional view of life. When he died two months after completing the novel, an impressive public funeral attested his stature as a major Russian writer.

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.