Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky [ a ] [ b ] 11 November [ O. Numerous literary critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature , [ 3 ] as many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. His novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. Born in Moscow in , Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends , and through books by Russian and foreign authors.
His mother died in when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mids he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk , which gained him entry into Saint Petersburg 's literary circles.
However, he was arrested in for belonging to a literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle , that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile.
In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer's Diary , a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction , which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.
Dostoevsky's body of work consists of thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and numerous other works. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov , philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche , Albert Camus , and Jean-Paul Sartre , and the emergence of Existentialism and Freudianism.
