Russian novelist and short story writer. Dostoyevsky grew up in a middle-class family in Moscow. His father, a doctor, was a tyrant toward his family, and his mother was a mild, pious woman who died before Dostoyevsky was sixteen. Partly to escape the oppressive atmosphere of his father's household, the boy acquired a love of reading, especially the works of Nikolai Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honore de Balzac.
Career
Novelist, journalist, and short-story writer. Member of the Petrashevsky Circle (a radical group of socialist thinkers), 1847-1849; political prisoner at a prison labor camp in Tobolsk, Russia, 1850-54; Vremya (journal), Russia, co-owner and editor, 1861-63; Epokha (journal), Russia, co-owner and editor, 1864-65; Grazhdanin (journal; title means "The Citizen"), Russia, editor and columnist, 1871-74; Dnevnik pisatelya (monthly journal), Russia, owner, author, and publisher, 1876-77, 1881. Public Speaker.
Views
Attained profound philosophical and psychological insights which anticipated important developments in twentieth-century thought, including psychoanalysis and existentialism