Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (????? ??????????? ????????????, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky {{Audio|ru-Dostoevsky.ogg|listen}}) (November 11, (October 30, Old Style), 1821, – February 9, (January 28, O.S.), 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia) was one of the greatest of Russian writers, whose works have a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. Often featuring characters with disparate and extreme states of the mind, his works exhibit both an uncanny grasp in human psychology as well as penetrating analyses in the politics, social and spiritual state of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic as precursors of modern-day thought and preoccupations. He is sometimes said to be a founder of existentialism, most notably in Notes from Underground, which has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written".

Major works

• Poor Folk (1846)
• ' (1846)
• Netochka Nezvanova (1849)
• The Village of Stepanchikovo (or The Friend of the Family) (1859)
• The Insulted and Humiliated (or The Insulted and the Injured) (1861)
• The House of the Dead (1862)
• A Nasty Story (1862)
• Notes from Underground (or Letters from the Underworld) (1864)
• Crime and Punishment (1866)
• The Gambler (1867)
• The Idiot (1868)
• The Possessed (or Demons or The Devils) (1872)
• The Raw Youth (or The Adolescent) (1875)
• The Brothers Karamazov (1880)