Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 and studied at the St Petersburg Engineering Academy before becoming a writer. His first novel, Poor Folk, came out in 1846 to a warm reception. In 1849 he was arrested for taking part in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. He was led out for a mock execution, then sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years. He died in St Petersburg in 1881.
Prison changed his fiction. The dreamy tone of the early work disappeared, and The House of the Dead drew on the camp itself. The great novels that followed turn on ideas that people actually live by, and on what happens when those ideas meet guilt, poverty or doubt. Britannica lists the origin of evil, the nature of freedom and the craving for faith among his central concerns. The method is psychological: characters argue, confess and contradict themselves, often in cramped rooms.
His major books are Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), which Britannica calls probably his greatest novel. Crime and Punishment follows Raskolnikov, a young intellectual in St Petersburg who kills an old pawnbroker after persuading himself that her money could do more good in other hands. Dostoevsky was writing it at the same time as The Gambler.
Start with Crime and Punishment. The murder comes early, and the rest of the book is the aftermath, so it reads closer to a thriller than its reputation suggests. Penguin's edition uses David McDuff's translation, and Penguin also issued an audio version read by Alex Jennings. If it hooks you, go to Notes from Underground for the sharper, stranger side of his thinking, then The Brothers Karamazov.
