Dostoieffsky, FEODOR MIKHAILOVITCH, a Russian novelist, was born at Moscow in 1818, passed through the imperial school of engineers, and after a short trial of the army adopted literature as a profession. His first story, Poor Folk (1846; Eng. trans. 1894), which painted with unsparing truth the condition of the peasantry and the more hopeless state of the poor in the cities, at once drew attention to him and to his views of social conditions. At this period he became involved in the Communist plots of Petrocheffsky, and in 1849 was condemned to twelve years' labour in the mines, and deported to Siberia. In 1856 he was permitted to return to St Petersburg, where in 1860 he published an account of his prison life (Eng. trans. 1887). His masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, which appeared in 1868, is one of the most powerful and affecting works in the whole range of modern fiction, realistic, but not with Zola's realism; strong in its grasp of character and its unshrinking analysis of motive; unique in a magnetic sympathy that impels the reader to identify himself with characters often sordid or repulsive, dwelling in an atmosphere of misery; and finally, is in its teaching good and ennobling. There is an English version (1886), and a French translation by Victor Derély. Other works that have appeared in English are Injury and Insult, The Idiot, Friend of the Family, and The Gambler. Dostoieffsky died at St Petersburg, 9th February
1881. In his later writings he developed an intense but scarcely enlightened patriotism, combined with an intolerance of European ideas, and a stubborn resistance to any liberal views attributed to the government.