Early in his career, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for involvement with an ostensibly proto-socialist organization. His sentence was stayed while he was on the firing line. A mounted messenger reached the execution literally right before they were going to fire. But as a consolation prize he got to spend four years in a Siberian labour camp, where he developed epilepsy that would plague him for the rest of his life. A few years after he was finally released, he married Maria Isaeva. A few years later Maria and Dostoevsky’s brother Mikhail died within months of each other, leaving Fyodor as the sole supporter of Mikhail’s family and Maria’s son Pavel. He later remarried to Anna Snitkina. They had a daughter Sonya, who died of pneumonia at the age of three months. They had three more kids. Their youngest son Alexey died at the age of three. He had a gambling addiction possibly related to the non-stop parade of trauma that was his life. He gambled away most of his money on several occasions.
There was a lot of darkness in that man’s life.
This was the first one to bond to mind for me! Alongside Breakfast of Champions, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and pretty much anything by Tom Robbins but especially Skinny Legs and All.