The son of an army doctor, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) was educated to be a military engineer, but he rejected a career in the army for literature, publishing Poor Folk in 1846. Though this first novel was hailed by critics, several subsequent works were less well received. In 1849 the Russian authorities arrested Dostoyevsky for subversive activity. After spending ten years in exile in Siberia, he returned to Saint Petersburg and began writing again, beginning a major phase of his career a few years later with the novella Notes from the Underground (1864). Important works such as The Idiot (1868- 69) and The Possessed (1872) came between two long masterpieces: Dostoyevsky’s first great novel, Crime and Punishment, and his last, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). Both focus on murder, guilt, and faith, but in different ways. While The Brothers Karamazov represents a more mature development of Dostoyevsky’s ideas, Crime and Punishment is generally considered to put those ideas in a more dramatic and gripping form. It also grounds them firmly in their immediate historical context, sweeping the reader into the dark mind of a murderer as it links his motivations directly to Russia’s intellectual climate in the mid-1860s.
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