Fyodor Dostoevsky entered literary life after training as a military engineer. Poor Folk, published in 1846, attracted the praise of Vissarion Belinsky and established him as a promising novelist. The less favourable reception of The Double complicated that early success. Participation in the Petrashevsky Circle brought him into discussion of prohibited political ideas. Arrested in 1849, he underwent a staged execution before a previously ordered reprieve was announced. Four years of penal labour in Siberia and subsequent compulsory military service interrupted his career and profoundly altered his intellectual outlook.

Returning to St Petersburg in 1859, he resumed publication and worked with his brother Mikhail on journals. Notes from the House of the Dead drew on imprisonment without functioning simply as a memoir. Notes from Underground presented a divided, self-conscious narrator who challenged optimistic claims about reason and human progress. Journal closures, bereavements and debt created continuing financial pressure. Gambling compounded his difficulties, and demanding contracts shaped his writing routine. Epilepsy also constrained his work.

Crime and Punishment appeared in 1866, exploring murder, rationalization, guilt and responsibility through Raskolnikov's actions. To meet another urgent deadline, Dostoevsky dictated The Gambler to stenographer Anna Snitkina, whom he married in 1867. During several years abroad he wrote The Idiot, testing the place of compassionate goodness in a divided society. Demons examined radical politics, manipulation and social collapse. Anna's management of publishing and finances helped stabilize the household and made possible his later work.

After returning to Russia in 1871, he combined fiction with journalism and the strongly personal commentary of A Writer's Diary. His Christian, nationalist and anti-Western views gained an audience while also generating controversy, including through hostile portrayals of Jews and other groups. The Brothers Karamazov, completed in 1880, brought family conflict together with debates over faith, freedom, suffering and moral accountability. His Pushkin address that year strengthened his standing as a national literary figure. He died in 1881. The novels' competing voices and unstable motives influenced later literature, philosophy and psychology, although their artistic openness should not obscure the exclusionary political positions he sometimes advanced.