Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was born in Moscow, the son of a physician, and educated at the Military Engineering College in St Petersburg. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was well received. In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for his involvement with a group of Utopian Socialists, the Petrashevsky Circle, only to be reprieved at the last moment. His experience of four years of hard labour and imprisonment in Siberia led to a profound change in his ideology. This is reflected in all his subsequent fictional masterpieces, from Notes from the House of the Dead (1862), to Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), as well as his journalism, including A Writer’s Diary, completed during his last decade.

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, scholar and translator. The author of biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov, she has also published books on Wagner, Shostakovich and the Futurist opera Victory Over The Sun. Her new translation of Anna Karenina was published in 2014, and follows two anthologies of Chekhov stories and a volume of his letters. She has written on Russian literature, art and music for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Apollo, and the Royal Opera House, and worked with institutions such as the National Theatre, the Salzburg Festival and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.