Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sentenced to death, reprieved at the scaffold and sent to Siberia for four years, Dostoevsky returned to write novels of ideas in which philosophical positions are embodied in people who suffer for them. He anticipated existentialism, psychoanalysis and the psychology of totalitarian belief.

• Wrote Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov in fifteen years
• Invented the polyphonic novel, in which no voice, including the author's, is given final authority
• Notes from Underground opened the literature of the alienated modern consciousness
• The Grand Inquisitor chapter remains one of the sharpest arguments about freedom and security ever written

Freud called The Brothers Karamazov the greatest novel ever written and built on its account of parricidal guilt; Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre all worked from Notes from Underground. Demons is read as a case study of ideological terrorism and is cited in radicalisation research. His name is invoked in criminal-justice and free-speech debate whenever the question is whether a person can be reduced to their worst act.

With his second wife Anna Snitkina — a stenographer he hired to meet a deadline — he had four children, two of whom survived to adulthood.