On December 22, 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was led before a firing squad in Semyonov Place, St. Petersburg. He was twenty-eight years old, convicted of participating in a socialist reading circle that discussed banned books. The prisoners were dressed in white execution robes. The first three men were tied to stakes. Dostoevsky was in the second group. He had perhaps sixty seconds to live.

Then a messenger galloped into the square with a reprieve from Tsar Nicholas I. The execution had been staged -- a calculated act of psychological torture designed to break the prisoners before commuting their sentences to hard labor. One of Dostoevsky's companions went permanently insane on the spot.

Dostoevsky did not go insane. He went to Siberia for four years, followed by six years of compulsory military service, and he returned with the raw material for the most devastating body of fiction ever written. The mock execution had shown him something about human consciousness at its extremity -- the way a mind facing annihilation becomes paradoxically, unbearably alive -- and that knowledge burned through everything he wrote afterward.

Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, follows Raskolnikov, a impoverished student who murders a pawnbroker to prove a philosophical theory and then discovers, through the slow disintegration of his sanity, that no theory can accommodate the reality of having taken a human life. The novel invented the psychological thriller and remains, a century and a half later, the most unsettling investigation of guilt in Western literature.

The Brothers Karamazov, his final and greatest novel, is a murder mystery, a theological debate, a family saga, and an inquiry into whether God's existence can be reconciled with the suffering of children. The chapter known as "The Grand Inquisitor" -- in which Ivan Karamazov tells a parable of Christ returning to Seville during the Inquisition -- is the most powerful argument against institutional religion ever embedded in a work of fiction, and it was written by a man who considered himself a believing Christian.

Dostoevsky was also an epileptic, a compulsive gambler who lost everything at the roulette tables of Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden, and a man whose personal life was a chaos of debt, jealousy, and desperate relocations across Europe. He dictated The Gambler in twenty-six days to meet a ruinous contract deadline, and married the stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who saved both the manuscript and his life.

He died in St. Petersburg in 1881, at fifty-nine. Thirty thousand people attended his funeral. He had spent his life asking the questions that most people spend their lives avoiding: What does it mean to be free? Can goodness exist without God? What happens to a human soul when all external structures of meaning collapse? He offered no easy answers. He offered, instead, characters so alive they seem to breathe on the page, and a vision of human consciousness so deep it still has not been surpassed.