Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist and thinker, born on 30 October 1821 in the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father worked as a doctor, and he died on 28 January 1881. He began as a young writer of social sympathy, but his life changed when he was arrested in 1849 for involvement with a circle of radical intellectuals. He was sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, an experience that deepened his religious feeling and shaped his later work.

His great novels explore guilt, freedom, faith, doubt and the divided mind, often through characters in poverty or moral crisis. Writing in a time of rapid social change in the Russian Empire, he created stories of intense psychological insight and fierce debate between competing ideas. Readers still turn to him for his honesty about human weakness and the search for meaning, and his influence on later fiction and philosophy has been immense.