Russian novelist whose four great novels of the 1860s and 1870s — Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Brothers Karamazov (1880) — are the principal 19th-century ancestor of religious Existentialism and of 20th-century philosophical fiction generally. Dostoevsky's life supplies much of his material. Arrested in 1849 for membership in a utopian-socialist circle, he was sentenced to death, paraded before a firing squad, and reprieved at the last moment by a theatrical imperial pardon; the four subsequent years in a Siberian prison camp and further years of army service in exile turned him from his youthful radicalism toward a dense, anti-rationalist Orthodox Christianity, a suspicion of Western liberal and socialist projects, and the conviction — worked out novel by novel — that human beings are not the rational utility-maximizers of the Enlightenment and cannot be made happy by any rearrangement of their external conditions alone.
His method is the polyphonic novel, as Mikhail Bakhtin influentially named it: the author does not stand above his characters arbitrating their positions but lets each articulate its own claim at full strength, so that Ivan Karamazov's atheistic revolt (the "Grand Inquisitor" chapter) reads as powerfully as the monastic answer in Father Zosima. The reader is left with a contest, not a conclusion. This is one reason readers as theologically opposed as Nietzsche (who called him "the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn") and Tillich could both find him essential.
Dostoevsky's influence is out of proportion to his readership. Notes from Underground (1864) is the proto-text of existentialism: its nameless narrator, with his "consciousness is a disease" and his insistence that a man would choose unhappiness simply to prove he is free, sets the terms Kierkegaard had been working in isolation and that Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, and Tillich would take up. The Brothers Karamazov is for many readers (Freud, Faulkner, Percy, O'Connor among them) the greatest novel ever written in any language.