Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, and one of the central names of nineteenth-century literature. He was born in Moscow, on November 11, 1821 (October 30 by the Russian calendar of the time), in a hospital for the poor where his father, Mikhail Andreyevich, was a doctor. The family was devout, of Orthodox Christian faith. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, and his father died in 1839: the official cause was apoplexy, and the rumor that the serfs had killed him was never proven.
He graduated from the Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg and gave up the service to live by writing. He debuted in 1846 with Poor Folk, hailed by the critic Vissarion Belinsky. In 1849 he was arrested for frequenting the Petrashevsky circle, which discussed French socialism and the emancipation of the serfs, and was sentenced to death; at the last moment, on December 22 of that year, the sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Omsk, Siberia, followed by military service. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, already a critic of the socialism he had embraced.
He ran magazines with his brother Mikhail, wrote Notes from Underground (1864) and, in debt, published Crime and Punishment in 1866. He suffered from epilepsy, lost a great deal of money at roulette, and married twice: to Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva and, later, to Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who looked after his finances. Then came The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov, completed in November 1880. He died in St. Petersburg on February 9, 1881 (January 28 by the Russian calendar), of a pulmonary hemorrhage, and was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in a procession of sixty-seven delegations.
On Clavis: Crime and Punishment.