Fyodor Dostoevsky’s father was a retired army surgeon who envisaged a military career for his son, but very soon after graduating from the Academy of Military Engineering in 1843, Dostoevsky devoted himself to writing. Acclaimed for its deep psychological insight and emotive storytelling, his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was an instant success; but was to be overshadowed by the masterpieces written decades later.
Dostoevsky went on to publish novels and stories on themes including poverty and madness, but he also joined the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of socialist intellectuals. Although not fully committed to their politics, Dostoevsky was among the Circle members arrested in 1849. They were imprisoned, sentenced to death and ‘reprieved’ as they faced the firing squad. With his sentence commuted to imprisonment, followed by military service, Dostoevsky was to spend the next ten years in Siberia and the army.
The trauma of a mock execution and the hardships of life in prison evidently deepened Dostoevsky’s understanding of human strength and weakness; but he also underwent a religious awakening, rejecting socialism and embracing the Russian Orthodox Church – the faith of the people.
When he returned from military service, Dostoevsky joined his brother Mikhail in founding and writing for a journal, Time, in 1861. The following year he was travelling in Western Europe, where he indulged in gambling, and Britain, where he was appalled at the poverty in London’s East End. Back in Russia, he married Anna Grigoryevna Smitkina, who had been his secretary and was to help him overcome the problems created by compulsive gambling and cope with the epilepsy that had begun during his exile.
During the years following his return to literary life, Dostoevsky produced some of the most celebrated writing in western literature, starting with The House of the Dead (1864), a novel based on his years in Siberia. He was a profound thinker, with extraordinary insight into the psychological challenges of poverty, crime, urban life and existential threat, whose great novels – Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) – were to influence psychologists, philosophers and writers, and have retained their power to engage readers to this day. In his later years, Dostoevsky began the Diary of a Writer as a compendium of thoughts, stories, journalism and memoir, but in 1881 he died of a pulmonary haemorrhage, with the Diary unfinished.
