The birth of a baby was hardly an unusual event at Moscow's Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. What set tiny Fyodor apart when he appeared on 11 November 1821 was that he was the son of one of the doctors, Mikhail Dostoevsky, and his wife Maria. He was a delicate child, but he was extraordinarily determined - and as a writer he would change the world for ever.

"The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in," wrote Virginia WoolfAn English novelist (1882 - 1941) whose best-known books include Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse.. "They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul...its passion, its tumult, its extraordinary medley of beauty and vileness."

Dostoevsky was ground-breaking, Woolf argued, because he recognised people's complexity, offering "a new panorama of the human mind". Humour and seriousness go hand in hand; a villain can also be a saint: "We love and we hate at the same time. There is none of that precise division between good and bad to which we are used."

His books also offer an astonishing variety of tones: in the words of the critic Daniel Kalder, they can be "nasty, violent, ironic, caustic, and (at times) extremely funny".

For the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the first writer since Shakespeare to give his characters independent voices rather than using them as mouthpieces for his own ideas. Bakhtin also credited Dostoevsky with "carnivalising" the world in his novels: that is, breaking down social boundaries and allowing characters to interact as if at a great street party.

The most famous of his 12 novels, Crime and Punishment, tells of a young man who murders an old woman and then bitterly regrets his deed. It is regarded as one of the finest studies of guilt ever written.

His epic The Brothers Karamazov focuses on three young men whose lives are blighted by their useless father.  It reflects the author's passionate interest in religionReligion is belief in a god or gods and the activities that are connected with this belief, such as praying or worshipping in a building such as a church or temple., as does The Idiot, the story of an unworldly young nobleman who strongly resembles Christ.

Much of Dostoevsky's own life reads like a novel. When he was 17, his father died in mysterious circumstances: several men were accused of murdering him, but acquitted.

He was just 24 when his first book, Poor Folk, was hailed as a work of genius. But his second, The Double, received a critical drubbing. It was 13 yeas before he re-established his reputation with House of the Dead.

At 28, he was arrested as part of a group of social reformers accused of fomenting revolution. Sentenced to death by firing squad, he was reprieved at the last minute, but served four years in prison in SiberiaA northern region of Russia, known for its harsh winters. It has a long history as a place of exile for criminals and political prisoners., living in filthy conditions with his hands and feet shackled.

His addiction to gamblingIn his forties he became obsessed with roulette for a period of eight years. meant that he and his wife Anna were frequently penniless. The death of their first child, Sofya, was a devastating blow.

But his reputation grew to the point that Tsar Alexander IIRuler of Russia from 1855 until his assassination in 1881. asked him to act as tutor to two of his sons. When he died in 1881, over 40,000 people attended his funeral.

Some say, yes: no other writer has explored what it means to be human, or wrestled with the great questions of existence, with the same intensity. He was able to draw on his own extraordinary experience of life, but also see the world entirely from another person's point of view.  

Others argue that he looked too much on the gloomy side of things. The drama and intensity of his books do not reflect most people's experience: Charles Dickens and James Joyce were better at portraying ordinary life. Shakespeare created more memorable characters; Tolstoy had sharper observation.