The bare events of Dostoevsky's life - his father murdered by peasants, his own ordeal before a firing squad, then exile in Siberia, his epilepsy, gambling, poverty and debts - go far to account for his strange intensity of vision. This biography, first published in 1931, traces his wayward development, from his strict and secluded childhood to his debut as 'literary pimple', through his years of anguish, to his maturity as artist and final apotheosis as Russian patriot.

Written some fifty years after Dostoevsky's death, when the material necessary for a full study first became...