Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, where his father was a doctor at a hospital for the poor. He trained as a military engineer, but quickly gave it up to write. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), a story in letters between a poor copying clerk and a young woman he loves, made him famous overnight. The great critic Vissarion Belinsky greeted him as a new Gogol.

Then he fell in with a circle of young men who met to read and discuss banned socialist books. In 1849 they were arrested. After eight months in prison, on a December morning, Dostoevsky and his comrades were taken to a square in St Petersburg, read their death sentences, and dressed in white shirts for execution. The first three were tied to posts. At the last moment, a messenger rode in with word that the tsar had commuted their sentences. The whole thing had been staged.

Dostoevsky spent four years at hard labor in a prison camp in Omsk, in Siberia, and then served years as a soldier in Central Asia. He suffered from epilepsy, and later from a ruinous passion for roulette, and was almost always in debt. In 1866, to meet a deadline in a contract that would otherwise give a shady publisher the rights to all his work, he hired a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, and dictated an entire novel, The Gambler, in less than a month. The next year he married her. Anna took over the family’s finances and was the steadying force of his last years.

He wrote his greatest novels in the last twenty years of his life: Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and finally The Brothers Karamazov (1880). They are full of feverish arguments about God, guilt, freedom and suffering, conducted by people in extreme states. The mock execution recurs in them more than once, most directly in The Idiot, where Prince Myshkin describes the thoughts of a man in the last minutes before death.

Dostoevsky died in St Petersburg in 1881. Tens of thousands followed his coffin.