Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, who lived from 11 November 1821 to 9 February 1881, was a Russian philosopher, novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Russian and world literature, whose most acclaimed novels, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent and The Brothers Karamazov, explore the human condition amid the troubled political, social and spiritual atmosphere of nineteenth century Russia; his 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature. Born in Moscow in 1821, he entered the Nikolayevsky Engineering Academy after his mother's death in 1837 and worked briefly as an engineer before his first novel, Poor Folk, gained him entry to Saint Petersburg's literary circles in the mid 1840s; in 1849 he was arrested for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia, and though sentenced to death the sentence was commuted at the last moment, sending him instead to four years of hard labor in Siberia, an experience that inspired The House of the Dead, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. He went on to work as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own, and developed a gambling addiction during travels in Western Europe that at times left him begging for money before he became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers, with a body of work of thirteen novels, three novellas and seventeen short stories that influenced writers including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov and philosophers including Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and that Friedrich Nietzsche credited as the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn.