Fyodor Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. Born in Moscow in 1821, he began adulthood by resigning a commission as a military engineer to embark on a writing career. The praise he earned for his first novel, Poor Folk, immediately vaulted him to literary stardom. His political activity led to imprisonment, a mock execution, and exile to a Siberian prison camp, all of which shaped his later novels. Since his death in 1881, he has been best remembered for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Constance Garnett (1861–1946) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature.