Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was arrested at twenty-seven for belonging to a circle of readers discussing banned books, sentenced to death, and reprieved on the scaffold — then spent four years in a Siberian prison camp. His later novels are arguments rather than stories: about whether a man may step outside ordinary morality, about what a person owes to suffering they did not cause, about faith held by people with every reason to abandon it. Because his work reaches English through several different translators, wording varies between editions. Each quote here names the translation it was taken from, and gives the part, book and chapter.