Fyodor Dostoevsky

Arrested at twenty-eight for reading banned political texts aloud, Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad that turned out to be a staged mock execution, the reprieve announced only after the guns were raised. Four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp followed, then internal exile; he emerged devoutly religious, epileptic, and permanently marked by what he'd witnessed.

Chronic gambling debts drove him to write at breakneck speed for money; he dictated one novel to a stenographer, Anna Snitkina, under contract deadline and married her soon after. Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, his final novel, both grew from the same conviction that ideas are never abstract: that nihilism, faith, and murder are things a person actually has to live through.