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Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November 1821. He had six siblings and his mother died in 1837 and his father in 1839. He graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering in 1846 but decided to change careers and become a writer. His first book, Poor Folk, did very well but on 23rd April 1849 he was arrested for subversion and sentenced to death. After a mock-execution his sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia where he developed epilepsy.He was released in 1854.His 1860 book, The House of the Dead was based on these experiences. In 1857 he married Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. After his release he adopted more conservative and traditional values and rejected his previous socialist position. In the following years he spent a lot of time abroad, struggled with an addiction to gambling and fell deeply in debt. His wife died in 1864 and he married Anna Grigoryeva Snitkina. In the following years he published his most enduring and successful books, includingCrime and Punishment (1865). He died on 9th February 1881.
Dostoevsky makes Martin Amis seem as if he was writing 130 years ago and that Dostoevsky is writing now. Read all of Dostoevsky. These books are for now and they matter, because it's up to us to call a halt to our TV producers, politicians, gutless artists, poets and writers: these teenagers of all ages who are propelling us towards a consumerist hell of disposability over quality -- Billy Childish Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Henry James - these are the great psychologists - far greater than Freud or Klein or Jung -- Sally Vickers No reader who knows The Brothers Karamazov should ignore this magnificent translation. And no reader who doesn't should wait any longer to acquaint himself with one of the peaks of modern fiction * USA Today * It returns us to a work we thought we knew - made new again * Washington Post * In this new translation one finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky's original * New York Times Book Review *
