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Theodore Dostoevsky is considered one of history's greatest novelists, but he is also one of history's greatest psychologists.

His stories contain depictions of characters who span the spectrum of human personality, from those of abject evil to those saintly in nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche was so impressed with the works of Dostoevsky that in a letter to a friend he stated that Dostoevsky's novels contain the most valuable psychological material I know.

In this video, we explore the life events that transformed Dostoevsky into a tortured genius

and helped him attain his unmatched understanding of the human psyche.

In the first months of 1849, Dostoevsky, then 27 years old, was considered a writer who had not lived up to his early potential.

Three years prior he had published the book Poor Folk, which catapulted him to fame in the Russian literary scene.

But his subsequent works were panned by critics and largely ignored by the public, and by 1849 many saw him as washed up.

Dostoevsky's career, however, had hardly started.

In the decades that followed, he would write some of history's greatest works of fiction

such as crime and punishment, the brothers Karamazov, the idiot, and demons.

What transformed Dostoevsky from a writer of mediocre success to one of the most

famous authors of all time was a five-year descent into a personal hell. Dostoevsky was arrested,

placed in solitary confinement, forced to endure a mock execution, and imprisoned in Siberia for

four years where he lived in filth and squalor with

criminals of the most depraved kind.

This experience made Dostoevsky intimately familiar with both the darkest depths and

the greatest heights of the human soul, and it provided him with ample material for his

stories.

The cause of Dostoevsky's five years of misfortune began with his decision to join

the Petrachevsky Circle, a weekly social gathering named after its host.

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