Among European writers of the nineteenth century Fyodor Dostoevsky is the preeminent novelist of modernity. He explored the far-ranging moral, religious, psychological, social, political, and artistic ramifications of the breakdown of traditional structures of authority and belief. He chronicled the rise and fall of the modern secular individual and traced the totalitarian potential of the new ideologies of his time, including socialism. He examined, as no one had previously, the potential for violence and the abuse of power in all forms of human interaction. His engagement with the ongoing issues of his time, his highly dramatic and melodramatic plots, his never-ending search for a more adequate form of religious expression, and his experimentation with narrative structure, character, and authorial voice give his fiction its unusual qualities.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on 30 October 1821 in the Moscow Mariinskii Hospital, where his father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, was a staff doctor...