Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Russian novelist whose fiction probes moral and psychological extremity, guilt, faith, poverty and free will, with a philosophical intensity that shaped both the modern psychological novel and, in the twentieth century, existentialist thought. Arrested in 1849 for participation in a group discussing banned political texts, he was sentenced to death, reprieved at the last moment in a staged mock execution, and served four years of Siberian penal servitude followed by forced military service, an experience that permanently marked his later fiction's preoccupation with suffering and redemption.