DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR (1821–1881), Russian novelist. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's childhood was spent in the constrained atmosphere of a Muscovite charity hospital, where his father served as a doctor. It was the murder of his father (1838) that was alleged by Freud to have determined the course of Dostoevsky's epilepsy. This theory is usually discounted, but there is no doubt about the epilepsy itself, nor about its capacity to inspire in its victim something of a "higher awareness." Early symptoms of the condition were experienced in 1849 during his first period of imprisonment. By this time the young Dostoevsky, a graduate of the Academy of Military Engineering in Saint Petersburg, had already established a reputation with some works of fiction, the earliest and most acclaimed of which was Poor Folk (1846).

But it was not for his writings that Dostoevsky had been arrested. His crime was having participated in a utopian-socialist discussion...