Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky faced a firing squad, was reprieved on the scaffold, and spent four years in a Siberian prison. Born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a military doctor at a hospital for the poor, he grew up on its grounds among patients. His father was possibly murdered by his own serfs. He trained as a military engineer, resigned, and published Poor Folk in 1846 to immediate acclaim. In 1849 he was arrested as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, which discussed banned socialist writings. He was sentenced to death, taken to a square, and had the sentence commuted as the first group stood at the posts — a piece of theatre staged on the tsar's instruction. One of the condemned lost his mind. He served four years at hard labour at Omsk in leg irons, permitted only the New Testament, followed by five years' military service. He returned a convinced Orthodox Christian and Russian nationalist, and with the epilepsy that recurred for the rest of his life. He was chronically in debt, largely through compulsive roulette, and wrote against deadlines set by creditors. He produced The Gambler in twenty-six days with a stenographer, Anna Snitkina, whom he then married. Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov followed between 1864 and 1880. They put ideas into people and then test them to destruction — a student who murders to prove himself extraordinary, an inquisitor who tells Christ that people do not want freedom. He died in St Petersburg in 1881.

• Lived: 1821 CE – 1881 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: writer, journalist, philosopher