Fyodor Dostoevsky

Biography

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881) lived a life that reads like one of his novels. He was arrested in 1849 for participation in the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary discussion group with radical political leanings. He was sentenced to death, subjected to a mock execution in which he stood before a firing squad for several minutes while the tsar's commutation was read — a psychological trauma he described as experiencing death itself. The sentence was commuted to four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by four years of military service. He returned to Petersburg transformed: the radical had become an Orthodox Christian mystic who believed that suffering was the path to redemption and that the Russian peasant's faith was the nation's only hope. He also returned with epilepsy, which worsened throughout his life. He was a compulsive gambler who wrote under crushing debt, often delivering manuscripts to publishers by the chapter to pay his bills. Crime and Punishment was written in 1865-66 under exactly these conditions. He was in debt, recently widowed (his first wife had died of tuberculosis), living alone, and had just lost everything gambling in Europe. He wrote the novel in ten months.

Fyodor Dostoevsky at a glance