There’s a Dostoevsky before Crime and Punishment, before The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot—a Dostoevsky before the ‘writer,’ whom I like to call the man. He was a recognised talent early on, yes, but nowhere near what he would become. At this stage of his life—before the literary deity—he was still being forged, first and foremost, through hardship and pain.

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And in Dostoevsky’s case, there’s no writer without the man first. I don’t mean you must know his life to understand his work—quite the opposite. Many of us read him without that context, and still feel every word, grasp every meaning, and experience every emotion. What I mean is this: it was his formation that didn’t just shape how he wrote, but made it possible for him to write at all.

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He was born into a household ruled by structure. His father, stern and often brutal, worked at a hospital for the poor, and the family lived near the grounds. Young Fyodor grew up side by side with Russia’s wounded and abandoned. He saw suffering up close, and it never left him.

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After a thorough home education guided by his father’s tremendous discipline, he was sent to a military academy in St. Petersburg, where he studied engineering. This is not particularly relevant to his intellectual formation, but it is indeed relevant to his personal one. Just like at home, he continued to live in an environment of stiffness, structure, and rules. As is typical of military education, there is no time to doubt—you do or you do.

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By that point, Dostoevsky devoured literature in secret, wrote stories late at night, and knew—deep down—that he would be a writer. He was not an easy fellow to deal with; his nerves were volatile, which made his moods swing wildly. It was around that time that he began to discover his epilepsy. 

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History has given too little credit to the influence of his brother, Mikhail. The two were close, bound by affection and a shared love of literature. Later, they would found and run a literary journal together. But even in these early years, Mikhail supported him emotionally and financially. He was a silent partner in Fyodor’s rise.

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When he finished school, he dedicated himself solely to writing. In no time, Dostoevsky’s first major success came: Poor Folk, a short novel told through letters between two impoverished people, which was unlike anything Russian readers had seen. It got him noticed. The critic Belinsky hailed him as the next great Russian voice. Dostoevsky was suddenly the literary star of St. Petersburg.

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But youth and fame rarely mix well. Caught in the high of early success, he wrote too fast and too much. His next works disappointed (The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady). The same critics who had raised him up began tearing him down. The young genius had peaked too early—or so it seemed.

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Then came the event that truly changed his life—and arguably, the reason why Dostoevsky is the king of literature: Siberia.

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In his late twenties, Dostoevsky was arrested for participating in a utopian socialist reading group. He was sentenced to death, but at the last moment—literally, at the gallows—his sentence was commuted to four years of forced labour in a Siberian prison camp, followed by mandatory military service. The Tsar, in his wisdom, preferred to break Dostoevsky slowly.

And he did.

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The man who had spent the last years surrounded by Russia’s nobility and intelligentsia now lived among murderers, rapists, and thieves. He slept on wooden boards and ate crusts. He endured the skin-cutting cold of the place where so many died. He witnessed the darkest corners of the human soul and, somehow, its glimmers of light.

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Siberia nearly killed Dostoevsky. But it also remade him. Later, he would say that everything he once believed—about morality, about man, about God—was shattered in those four years.

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Out of that experience came The House of the Dead—a semi-autobiographical novel about prison life. It marked his return to the literary scene. Something had changed. The old Dostoevsky had talent, but the new one had depth. Shortly after, he founded the journal Vremya (The Time) with Mikhail. Those years—writing, editing, reading everything in Russia—were crucial. It wasn’t just that he worked hard (he did); it was that he read everyone. He was in constant dialogue with the Russian intellectual world. This was his real education.

 

Dostoevsky was deeply engaged with the literary and political debates of his time. He responded to ideas. He attacked and defended. He absorbed the questions circulating in Russian life—about freedom, revolution, morality—and then reimagined them through character and plot.

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He, and all writers in his time, had to fight a common enemy: censorship. Every word published in Russia passed through the hands of the state censors. So writers had to learn subtlety. Their ideas had to wear masks. Their truth had to arrive in disguise. That pressure shaped Dostoevsky’s style: multi-voiced, indirect, psychological. Nothing was handed to the reader, and everything had to be discovered.

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Around this time, Dostoevsky travelled to Europe, a long-awaited adventure. Russian society admired the West—France, England, Italy and Germany. But Dostoevsky came back disillusioned. He didn’t find the freedom or soul he hoped for. What he did find was another kind of poverty—moral and spiritual. 

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Dostoevsky, like many Russian writers, was invested in the task of exploring nihilism, socio-political tendencies, and existential despair. But the brilliance of Dostoevsky was to ingrain and embody these ideas by placing them in men and women who loved, struggled, failed, broke, and prayed. 

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His early fiction borrowed themes and psychological textures from the 18th-century Gothic novel, but his style evolved into something uniquely Russian: long, emotionally charged, and dialectically rich, though never ornamental for its own sake.

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What’s impressive is that through all this, he suffered epileptic attacks, depression, and poverty. At one point, his wife and niece died within months. His journal was banned. He was deep in debt. But every morning, crushed or not, he would get up and write. And that’s how, in the midst of struggle, Notes from Underground came to be. 

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It is hard to believe that someone could endure life that way and still be able to work, but that’s precisely what made the man, Dostoevsky.

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Before Crime and Punishment, there were Poor Folk, The House of the Dead, and Notes from Underground. If you read them, you’ll see everything that would later come to define him: his obsession with moral freedom, his empathy for the humiliated, his war against pride, his belief that no man is beyond salvation.

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And if you pay enough attention, you’ll see he was already great. He just hadn’t yet begun.