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The Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky stands at the very summit of Russian literature and is considered by many to have brought the Western novel to the peak of its possibilities. Sigmund Freud, for one, considered the treatment of patricide in The Brothers Karamazov the equal of that of Shakespeare in Hamlet and of Sophocles in Oedipus Rex, while Jean Paul Sartre has said that all of French Existentialism is to be found in Ivan Karamazov's contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted. Dostoyevsky has had a profound effect on Western consciousness, and it is difficult to think of a 20th-century American novelist whose work does not show traces of his influence. This is most clearly seen in the motif of the "underground hero," that is, the hero who is alienated from technology and the so-called advances of civilization.

The son of a Moscow military doctor who was murdered by his serfs, Dostoyevsky grew up in materially comfortable but psychologically damaging circumstances. After finishing a military engineering education in 1843, he soon turned to literature. His first published work, Poor Folk (1846), was widely hailed in literary circles, but subsequent works in the 1840s, among which were The Double (1846), Mr. Prokharchin (1846), The Landlady (1847), and Netochka Nezvanova (1849), were less warmly received.

In 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested for participation in a mildly subversive group, the Petrashevsky Circle, and sentenced first to prison and then to a harsh exile in Siberia for a total of ten years. These experiences--and especially his last-minute reprieve from an expected execution--led him to embrace more fervently his Orthodox religious values and to reject the West as a model for Russian society. Along with the consumptive wife he had married, he returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 and there entered upon the major phase of his literary career.