With the success of his first novel, Dostoevsky was briefly embraced by the Russian literati and quit his engineering job with the military. So, he wrote a manuscript of what would become 'Poor Folk,' and a friend got it into the hands of a big-name literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, who thought it was a work of genius. Orphaned, Dostoevsky managed to graduate from a military academy and become an army engineer ('not a very good one,' says Christofi), but what he really wanted to do is write like his literary hero Nikolai Gogol. Dostoevsky's mother died of tuberculosis when he was 15, and his father was murdered two years later.

At school, he got lost in daydreams and was bullied by more aristocratic classmates. He grew up in Moscow, spending most of his childhood at a hospital for the poor where his father was a doctor. Let's get to know the real Dostoevsky through five revealing quotes from his life and literature:ĭostoevsky's life to that point hadn't been easy. Some of his most famous works include 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'Notes from Underground' and 'Crime and Punishment,' books that shaped existentialism and even psychology. Yes, Dostoevsky suffered from crippling epileptic seizures and struggled with a gambling addiction, but he was also a devoted family man who found the love of his life with his second wife and close collaborator, Anna.

'Our image of Dostoevsky as this scowling, sickly Russian writer of weighty novels obscures a more nuanced picture of the real man,' says Alex Christofi, author of ' Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life,' a literary biography of the Russian novelist. In fact, his belief in God and the redemptive power of love were never stronger. But unlike some of his contemporaries, he didn't lose faith. He had come face to face with his own mortality and had seen depths of cruelty that man can inflict and endure. Dostoevsky returned from Siberia a changed man.

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