Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский; November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. His name has been transcribed in to English using various spellings, with some early translations rendering his first name by its English equivalent, Theodore. This is because, before the post - revolutionary orthographic reform which, amongst other things, replaced the cyrillic letter Ѳ ('th') with the cyrillic letter Ф ('f'), Dostoyevsky's name was written Ѳеодоръ (Theodor) Михайловичъ Достоевскій.

Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th century existentialism, Dostoyevsky wrote, with the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Notes from Underground (1864), which was called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann. Dostoyevsky is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail and grandfather, Andrey, were born in modern central Ukraine. Mikhail was a doctor and a devout Christian, who practiced at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky, the second of seven children. The family lived in a small apartment in the Mariinsky Hospital grounds. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas near a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoyevsky, whose interest in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent in his life and works. Although it was forbidden by his parents, Dostoyevsky liked to wander out to the hospital garden, where the patients sat to catch a glimpse of the sun. The young Dostoyevsky appreciated spending time with these patients and listening to their stories.

There are many stories of Dostoyevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children, but this despotism was tempered by his extreme care for his children and their upbringing. After returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted the flies that came near his head. But the father was also careful to send his children to private schools where they would not be beaten. In the opinion of Joseph Frank, author of a definitive biography of Dostoyevsky, the father figure in The Brothers Karamazov is not based on Dostoyevsky's own father. Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that they did have a fairly loving relationship.

In 1837, shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis, Dostoyevsky and his brother were sent to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, now called the Military Engineering - Technical University. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was murdered by his own serfs. According to one account, the serfs became enraged during one of his drunken fits of violence, and after restraining him, poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. A similar account appears in Notes from Underground. Another story holds that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented the story of his murder so that he could buy the estate at a cheaper price. Some, like Sigmund Freud in his 1928 article, "Dostoevsky and Parricide", have argued that his father's personality had influenced the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the "wicked and sentimental buffoon", father of the main characters in his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, but such claims fail to withstand the scrutiny of many critics.

Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy and his first seizure occurred when he was nine years old. Epileptic seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoyevsky's experiences are thought to have formed the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in his novel The Idiot and that of Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, among others.

At the Saint Petersburg Institute of Military Engineering Dostoyevsky was taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he focused on areas different from mathematics, he did well in the exams and received a commission in 1841. That year, influenced by the German poet / playwright Friedrich Schiller, he wrote two romantic plays: Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov. The plays have not been preserved. Dostoyevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when he was a young man. He also revered Schiller at that age. However, in the years during which he wrote his great masterpieces, his opinions changed and he sometimes made fun of Schiller.

Dostoyevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842, and left the Engineering Academy the following year. He completed a translation into Russian of Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet in 1843, but it brought him little to no attention. Dostoyevsky started to write his own fiction in late 1844 after leaving the army. In 1846, his first work, the epistolary short novel, Poor Folk, printed in the almanac A Petersburg Collection (published by N. Nekrasov), was met with great acclaim. As legend has it, the editor of the magazine, poet Nikolai Nekrasov, walked into the office of liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky and announced, "A new Gogol has arisen!" Belinsky, his followers, and many others agreed. After the novel was fully published in book form at the beginning of the next year, Dostoyevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.

In 1846, Belinsky and many others reacted negatively to his novella, The Double, a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his life. Dostoyevsky's fame began to fade. Much of his work after Poor Folk received ambivalent reviews and it seemed that Belinsky's prediction that Dostoyevsky would be one of the greatest writers of Russia was mistaken.

Dostoyevsky was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Tsar Nicholas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any type of underground organization which he felt could put autocracy in jeopardy. On November 16 of that year, Dostoyevsky, along with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Later, Dostoyevsky described his years of suffering to his brother, as being, "shut up in a coffin." In describing the dilapidated barracks which "should have been torn down years ago", he wrote:

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall... We were packed like herrings in a barrel... There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs... Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel...

This experience inspired him to write The House of the Dead.

Dostoyevsky was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. He spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan. While there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia. After her husband's death, they married in February 1857.

Dostoyevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions. First, his ordeal somehow caused him to become disillusioned with "Western" ideas; he repudiated the contemporary Western European philosophical movements, and instead paid greater tribute in his writings to traditional, rustic Russian values exemplified in the Slavophile concept of sobornost. But even more significantly, he had what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a conversion experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox, faith. Dostoyevsky would later depict his conversion experience in the short story, The Peasant Marey (1876).

In his writings, Dostoyevsky started to extol the virtues of humility, submission, and suffering. He now displayed a much more critical stance on contemporary European philosophy and turned with intellectual rigor against the Nihilist and Socialist movements; and much of his post - prison work — particularly the novel, The Possessed, and the essays, The Diary of a Writer — contains both criticism of socialist and nihilist ideas, as well as thinly veiled parodies of contemporary Western influenced Russian intellectuals (Timofey Granovskiy), revolutionaries (Sergey Nyechayev), and even fellow novelists (Ivan Turgyenyev). In social circles, Dostoyevsky allied himself with well known conservatives, such as the statesman Konstantin Pobyedonostsyev. His post - prison essays praised the tenets of the Pochvyennichyestvo movement, a late 19th century Russian nativist ideology closely aligned with Slavophilism.

Dostoyevsky's post - prison fiction abandoned the Western European style domestic melodramas and quaint character studies of his youthful work in favor of dark, more complex storylines and situations, played out by brooding, tortured characters — often styled partly on Dostoyevsky himself — who agonized over existential themes of spiritual torment, religious awakening, and the psychological confusion caused by the conflict between traditional Russian culture and the influx of modern, Western philosophy. Nonetheless, this does not take from the debt which Dostoyevsky owed to earlier Western influenced writers such as Gogol whose work grew from the irrational and anti - authoritarian spiritualist ideas contained within the Romantic movement which had immediately preceded Dostoyevsky in West Europe. However, Dostoyevsky's major novels focused on the idea that utopia and positivist ideas were unrealistic and unobtainable.

In December 1859, Dostoyevsky returned to Saint Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch), with his older brother Mikhail. The former was shut down as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863. That year Dostoyevsky traveled to Europe and frequented gambling casinos. There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for Dostoyevsky's "proud women", such as the two characters named Katerina Ivanovna, in Crime and Punishment and in The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, which was followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts; furthermore, he decided to assume the responsibility of his deceased brother's outstanding debts, as well providing for his wife's son from her earlier marriage and his brother's widow and children. Dostoyevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.

Dostoyevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion and its consequences. He completed Crime and Punishment in a mad hurry because he was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. He had been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have claimed the copyrights to all of Dostoyevsky's writings.

Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoyevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Suslova, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoyevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, a twenty year old stenographer. Shortly before marrying her in 1867, he dictated The Gambler to her. From 1873 to 1881 he published the Writer's Diary, a monthly journal of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events. The journal was an enormous success.

Dostoyevsky influenced, and was himself influenced, by the philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov was the inspiration for the characters Ivan Karamazov and Alyosha Karamazov.

In 1877, Dostoyevsky gave the keynote eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy. On 8 June 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow. In his later years, Dostoyevsky lived for an extended period at the resort of Staraya Russa in northwestern Russia, which was closer to Saint Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts.

Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. A copy of the New Testament Bible given to him in Siberia sat on his lap. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral.

His tombstone reads; Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (Excerpt from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.)

The rented apartment where he died and spent the last few years of his life is where he wrote his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. The apartment, situated in a building at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok, has been restored from old photographs to how it looked when he lived there. It opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum and is a popular tourist attraction in the city.

Some, like journalist Otto Friedrich, consider Dostoyevsky to be one of Europe's major novelists, while others like Vladimir Nabokov maintain that from a point of view of enduring art and individual genius, he is a rather mediocre writer who produced wastelands of literary platitudes.

Dostoyevsky promoted in his novels religious moralities, particularly those of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, "Dostoyevsky and the Religion of Suffering," the essay devoted to Dostoyevsky in Eugène - Melchior de Vogüé's Le roman russe (1886), is widely considered to be the most influential early analysis of the novelist's work, introducing Dostoyevsky and other Russian novelists to the West. Nabokov argued in his University courses at Cornell, that such religious propaganda, rather than artistic qualities, was the main reason Dostoyevsky was praised and regarded as a 'Prophet' in Soviet Russia.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf praised his prose. Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoyevsky as a major influence on his work, in his posthumous collection of sketches A Moveable Feast. Kurt Vonnegut in his famous novel Slaughterhouse - Five mentions Dostoevsky in such way:

[Eliot] Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy [Pilgrim] one time ... He said that everything there was to know about life is in "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore," said Rosewater.

In a book of interviews with Arthur Power (Conversations with James Joyce), Joyce praised Dostoyevsky's prose:

...he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present - day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence.

In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said:

The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.