Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death in 1849 for reading a banned letter aloud, reprieved in front of the firing squad, and sent to Siberia for four years’ hard labour and six in the army. He returned an Orthodox Christian and a gambler, and wrote the great novels in his last fifteen years, always against deadlines and debts. Crime and Punishment follows a murderer to confession; The Idiot tries to portray a perfectly good man; The Brothers Karamazov, finished months before his death, puts the case against God in the Grand Inquisitor and the answer in Alyosha. Nietzsche called him the only psychologist he had anything to learn from.