Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · b. 1821

Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad for radical politics, was reprieved at the last second, and served four years in Siberian chains — experience that fueled the great psychological novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov. Epileptic, gambling-addicted, and permanently in debt, he wrote the modern soul's case files a century before psychology caught up.