He is also famous for writing The Brothers Karamazov, which many critics, such as Sigmund Freud, have said was one of the best novels ever written. He is sometimes considered to be a founder of existentialism, most frequently for Notes from Underground, which has been described as "the best overture for existentialism ever written". Many of his best-known works are prophetic. They might show both a strange grasp of human psychology as well as good analyses of the political, social and spiritual states of Russia of Dostoevsky's time. Those characters are sometimes in extreme states of mind. Very often, he wrote about characters who live in poor conditions. His works have had a big effect on twentieth-century fiction. Many scholars see Dostoyevsky as one of the greatest psychologists in literature. Colin Wilson in The Outsider describes him as a "tormented half-atheist-half-Christian". Malcolm Jones sees elements of Islam and Buddhism in Dostoyevsky's religious convictions. According to Townsend, "Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory", in which people suffer to pay for their sins, rather than the Christian doctrine of salvation through Christ. įrom an analysis of religious ideas in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Demons ( The Possessed), and The Brothers Karamazov, James Townsend thinks Dostoyevsky held orthodox Christian beliefs except for his view of salvation from sin. He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth". In a letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoyevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave". In prison, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. Raised in an educated and religious family, Dostoyevsky's beliefs changed through his life. The new generation of Russian intellectuals was gripped by European theories and philosophies were melded together into a peculiarly Russian combination that came to be called ' nihilism' ".
He was particularly scornful of the ideas he found in St Petersburg when he returned from his decade of Siberian exile. "Dostoyevsky's experience had altered him profoundly. The experience had cost him ten years of his life. A year later he was back in St Petersburg. In 1859 a new tsar allowed Dostoyevsky to end his Siberian exile. The punishment was changed to a sentence of exile and hard labour, but not before they were forced to go through a mock execution. They were found guilty of planning to distribute subversive propaganda and condemned to death by firing squad. After months of questioning and investigation they were tried.
On 22 April 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned with the other members. A police agent reported the group to the authorities. In his 20s he joined a group of radicals in St Petersburg They were into French socialist ideas. The most popular novels are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) was a Russian novelist.