Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) was educated in Moscow and at the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg. In 1844, he resigned his commission in the army to devote himself to literature. His first novels and short stories were critical and popular successes, but in 1848, he was arrested for belonging to a young socialist group. Tried and condemned to death, he was saved from execution at the last moment when his sentence was commuted to prison in Siberia. In 1859, he was granted full amnesty and allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In the next few years, he wrote his first full-length novels: The Friend of the Family (1859) and The Insulted and the Injured (1861). Notes from Underground (1864) was in many ways his most influential work of this period, containing the wellsprings of his mature philosophy: the hope of gaining salvation through degradation and suffering. At the end of this literary period, his wife died. Plagued by epilepsy and faced with financial ruin, he worked at superhuman speed to produce The Gambler , dictating the novel to eighteen-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who was to become his second wife. During the next fourteen years, Dostoyevsky wrote his greatest works: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Linda Ivanits is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of scholarly interest include nineteenth-century Russian literature and folklore. She is the author of numerous articles on folklore and literature as well as the books Russian Folk Belief and Dostoevsky and the Russian People .

Gary Rosenshield is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His publications include Crime and Punishment: The Techniques of the Omniscient Narrator, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, and Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, The Jury Trial and The Law, as well as numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose.