Dark Genius: A Dostoevsky Quiz

Question 1 of 10:

Though he had no interest in it, Dostoevsky was pushed by his stern and domineering father into becoming...?

A doctor

An accountant

An engineer

An architect

He would go onto write richly woven epics, but Dostoevsky 's first novel was a relatively simple tale called...?

Poor Folk

The Overcoat

My Childhood

The Double

Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to hard labour in 1849 for...?

Homosexuality

Manslaughter

Left-wing activism

Robbery

Dostoevsky 's would spend four years in a Serbian prison. He described this hellish time in which book?

Dead Souls

The House of the Dead

The Gulag Archipelago

The Trial

Dostoevsky 's first major book, ‘Crime and Punishment’, drew from his existentialist tract of 1864. What was it called?

The Double

Notes from Underground

The Eternal Husband

The Idiot

He may have been one of the world's most profound novelists, but Dostoevsky was also...?

An opium addict

A kleptomaniac

An obsessive gambler

An alcoholic

Dostoevsky 's growing conservatism inspired him to write which angry novel about a group of radical lefties?

A Hero of Our Time

The Possessed

Ghosts

Fathers and Sons

Dostoevsky suffered from, and often wrote about, which disorder of the brain?

Schizophrenia

Epilepsy

Narcolepsy

Cerebral palsy

Dostoevsky 's greatest novel is generally regarded to be ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. What does it centre around?

An old man's murder

The Napoleonic wars

The theft of a painting

The abolition of serfdom

They never met, but which other great Russian writer was Dostoevsky 's direct contemporary?

Pushkin

Tolstoy

Chekhov

Solzhenitsyn