Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born of lower-middle-class parents in 1821, the second of seven children, and lived until 1881. His father, an army doctor attached to the staff of a public hospital, was a stern and righteous man while his mother was the opposite — passive, kindly, and generous — and this fact accounts perhaps for Dostoevsky's often filling his novels with characters who seem to possess opposite extremes of character.
Dostoevsky's early education was in an army engineering school, where he was apparently bored with the dull routine and the unimaginative student life. He spent most of his time, therefore, dabbling in literary matters and reading the latest authors; the penchant for literature was obsessive. And, almost as obsessive was Dostoevsky's interest in death, for while the young student was away at school, his father was killed by the serfs on his estate. This sudden and savage murder smoldered within the young Dostoevsky and, when he began to write, the subject of crime, and murder in particular, was present in every new publication; Dostoevsky was never free of the horrors of homicide and even at the end of his life, he chose to write of a violent death — the death of a father — as the basis for his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.
After spending two years in the army, Dostoevsky launched his literary career with Poor Folk, a novel that was an immediate and popular success and one highly acclaimed by the critics. Never before had a Russian author so thoroughly examined the psychological complexity of man's inner feelings and the intricate workings of the mind.
Following Poor Folk, Dostoevsky's only important novel for many years was The Double, a short work dealing with a split personality and containing the genesis of a later masterpiece, Crime and Punishment.
