Fyodor Dostoevsky

Who Was Fyodor Dostoevsky?

Fyodor Dostoevsky was the greatest novelist of the Russian tradition and the supreme literary theologian of the modern world — a writer whose four major novels engage the most important questions of his age — about God, freedom, suffering, and the human condition — with an imaginative power that has not been surpassed. Born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a physician who was later murdered by his own serfs, he was educated at the Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg before abandoning engineering for literature.

His life was shaped by a series of catastrophes that would have destroyed a lesser man. He was arrested in 1849 for involvement with a radical literary circle, subjected to a mock execution, and sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia followed by compulsory military service. The experience of his near-execution and his years in prison transformed his politics and deepened his Christianity in ways that shaped everything he subsequently wrote.

His major novels — Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) — constitute one of the most profound bodies of fiction in world literature. They are organized around the conviction that the human being cannot live without God, that the attempt to do so produces either nihilism or the most destructive forms of idealism, and that the answer to the problem of evil is not a philosophical argument but a person.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Poor Folk — 1846
• Notes from Underground — 1864
• Crime and Punishment — 1866
• The Idiot — 1869
• Demons — 1872
• A Writer's Diary — 1873–1881
• The Brothers Karamazov — 1880