Place
Moscow
The ancient heart of Russia, where Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born into a hospital family in 1821, and where the contradictions of Russian life (faith, suffering, reform, and repression) that would define his novels were already fully present.
Moscow in 1821 was still largely wooden, rebuilt after Napoleon burned it, and Dostoyevsky was born on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor where his father worked as a doctor. The family lived in an apartment inside the institution, and the children were forbidden to speak to the patients they passed in the corridors. He said later that he had known the sick and the destitute as neighbours before he could read.
Thinkers Connected to Moscow
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He stood before a firing squad, survived, and came back to write the books that asked whether God exists, whether murder can be justified, and whether suffering has meaning.
Leo Tolstoy
He wrote two of the greatest novels ever created, then renounced them, because he had found something more important than art: how to live.