Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested at twenty-seven for belonging to a circle that discussed banned books, sentenced to death, and marched to a firing squad before the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp and six more as a common soldier, and everything he wrote afterwards was written by a man who had been told he had minutes to live. His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, are arguments conducted at the pitch of a fever, in which every position is given its strongest advocate before it is broken. He was an epileptic, a compulsive gambler and permanently in debt; The Gambler was dictated in a matter of weeks to satisfy a contract that would otherwise have cost him the rights to everything he had written. No novelist has been more useful to psychology, theology and politics, and none is harder to enlist on any one side.