It’s the birthday of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), known as one of the greatest novelists in history and one of the greatest influences on all of 20th century literature. (You may know him from such works as Crime and Punishment, 1866; The Idiot, 1869; and The Brothers Karamazov, 1880.) Considered one of the most brilliant psychological writers ever, he is also lauded for his treatment of Big Huge Philosophical Ideas, and basically everybody else can just go home.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow to a family of merchants and priests, though his father became a doctor. The important thing is that Dostoyevsky didn’t come from landed gentry, like so many Russian writers at the time, and this affected his ideas and writing for life. He read widely from a young age and one of the authors he liked was the popular gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. (Who knew? Okay, britannica.com knew. I didn’t.) Dostoyevsky’s mother died in 1837 and his father in 1839, by which time Dostoyevsky was already at the Academy of Military Engineering in St. Petersburg—his father’s idea. Soon after graduating, Dostoyevsky left the military to become a writer.

With Dostoyevsky’s first novella, Poor Folk (1846), he hit one out of the park and came to the attention of some of the great writers and critics of the day, drawing comparisons to Nikolay Gogol (if you don’t know Russian lit, that’s a big hairy deal). In 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested for his association with a revolutionary group. (He himself wasn’t pro-revolutionary, but he was anti-serfdom.) As part of his punishment—this is fun—he and several others were marched out of prison to a firing squad and made to believe they were about to be executed; a reprieve came at the last possible second. This experience colored the rest of Dostoyevsky’s life and of course his fiction in a big way. (If I had an experience like that under my belt, I’d be constantly trotting it out. People would avoid me because of it.) Dostoyevsky then spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, which led to his founding the proud Russian tradition of prison camp literature with his novel, The House of the Dead (1861).

What else do we know about Dostoyevsky’s life? So much. Oh, so very much. A few highlights: he was profoundly Christian in his beliefs. He had a first, unhappy marriage to a woman he nonetheless loved (she died in 1864); had a couple affairs and a teensy issue with gambling; and a second marriage to a woman with whom he had four children. Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy from his prison days, and lost one son after the son had a severe epileptic seizure. His novel The Possessed (1872) is considered “the most brilliant political novel ever written.” His masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, explores issues of evil and faith as played out in the story of four very different brothers and their lousy father, who is murdered early on. (He’s one of those victims you don’t really miss but still: murder.) Drama ensues. It’s interesting and moving. It’s brilliant. Dostoyevsky died at his home in St. Petersburg after several pulmonary hemorrhages, and a hell of a lot of people showed up for his funeral, maybe 50,000 to 100,000.

Have a brilliant Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.