Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist and essayist whose late masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, place him among the greatest novelists in any language. After youthful involvement in a circle of utopian socialists, he was sentenced to death and reprieved at the last moment, then sent to four years of penal labor in Siberia, an experience that shaped the rest of his writing. His novels are extended philosophical and religious investigations of guilt, faith, freedom, and the problem of evil that have decisively influenced twentieth-century existentialism and theology.