His father was a doctor at a Moscow hospital for the poor, and the family lived in a wing of the building. In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a radical circle and sentenced to death. At the last moment, in front of the firing squad, the sentence was changed to hard labor in Siberia.
Those years shaped his later novels, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, which deal with guilt, faith and freedom. He died in St. Petersburg in 1881.
Source: Wikipedia