Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, essayist and journalist of the 19th century, widely ranked among the greatest writers in any language. His major novels, from Crime and Punishment (1866) to The Brothers Karamazov (1880), probe guilt, faith, freedom and suffering against the background of a Russian Empire in rapid and troubled change. A mock execution, Siberian imprisonment, poverty and gambling debts all shaped a body of work that later influenced existentialist philosophy, psychology and the modern novel.

He was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821 (30 October by the Russian calendar of the time), the second child of Mikhail Dostoevsky, a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, and grew up in the family's quarters on the hospital grounds, among some of the city's poorest people. Fairy tales, the Bible, Pushkin and Walter Scott fed an early love of stories.

His mother died of tuberculosis in February 1837. He was sent to the military engineering academy in Saint Petersburg, which he disliked. His father died in 1839.

After a brief career as an engineer, he turned to writing. His first novel, Poor Folk, completed in 1845 and published in January 1846, was hailed by the critic Vissarion Belinsky as a pioneering social novel. Later works fared badly, and he joined radical circles, including the group around Mikhail Petrashevsky, which discussed censorship, serfdom and banned books.

Tsar Nicholas I, alarmed by the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, had the circle's members arrested in April 1849. On 23 December they were led out to be shot in Saint Petersburg, only for a message from the tsar commuting the sentences to arrive at the last moment. Dostoevsky later drew on this experience in The Idiot.

He spent four years in shackles at a hard-labour prison in Omsk, followed by compulsory army service at Semipalatinsk, in what is now Kazakhstan. The New Testament, the only book he was allowed in prison, deepened his Orthodox faith. In 1857 he married a widow, Maria Isaeva, in an unhappy match, and in 1859 he was allowed to return to European Russia. His account of convict life, The House of the Dead, appeared from 1860 and was the first novel on Russia's prisons to reach print.

In the 1860s he ran magazines with his brother Mikhail, travelled in western Europe and gambled heavily in German spa towns. Both his wife and brother died in 1864, leaving him with large debts and dependants. Notes from Underground appeared that year, followed in 1866 by Crime and Punishment, serialised in The Russian Messenger.

To meet a deadline for The Gambler he hired a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, whom he married in 1867. Fleeing creditors, the couple spent four years abroad in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where he finished The Idiot in Florence in 1869 and began Demons, inspired by a murder within a revolutionary group. Back in Saint Petersburg from 1871, Anna ran their own publishing business.

His collected essays, A Writer's Diary, sold well, and Tsar Alexander II invited him to the palace. Politically he had moved to conservatism, Russian Orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism, and he wrote scornfully of western Europe; critics have also accused him of antisemitism. His speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow in June 1880 was received with great acclaim, and The Brothers Karamazov appeared that year. He died in Saint Petersburg on 9 February 1881 after a series of lung haemorrhages and was buried at the Alexander Nevsky monastery; estimates of the crowd at his funeral range from 40,000 to more than 100,000.

Admirers have included Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka, and he shaped the existentialism of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin built a theory of the novel around his many independent voices. His books exist in more than 170 languages.

Our 1815 and 1878 maps show the Russian Empire of his lifetime, stretching from Saint Petersburg to the Siberian prisons where he served his sentence.