The Life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a Russian novelist who lived and wrote in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He is considered by many to be the greatest writer since Shakespeare who has a profound understanding of human beings. Dostoyevsky was immersed in the modern world and gives a depiction of a world of modern horrors. His work is extremely dark. He could see the coming Russian revolution a half a century before it occurred, with its millions of victims. He was obsessed with the irrational actions of man. Raised in a religious home that studied the Bible and knew the lives of the saints, he later left the faith and became a socialist and atheist. He was, as he says, a product of the times. Arrested for being a revolutionary he was sentenced to death, sent to Siberia, placed in front of a firing squat, black sack over his head, ready to die. The guns never fired. The men had received a reprieve from the Czar. He returned to the Faith, changed his political views from revolutionary against the state to revolutionary Christ and the truth. His last five novels deal with human nature at its best and its worst.

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