Fyodor Dostoevsky
AuthorBio
Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. Renowned as a writer and journalist during his lifetime, he spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, and six years of compulsory military service in exile, in punishment for his membership of an intellectual group critical of the tsarist regime. A compulsive gambler who was at times reduced to begging for money from family and friends, he nevertheless produced masterpieces of psychological and existential fiction including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from the Underground, as well as short stories and novellas.Nicolas Pasternak Slater was brought up bilingual in Russian by his mother Lydia, a sister of Boris Pasternak. He has translated Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and an anthology of Lydia Pasternak's writings, as well as translations of work by Pushkin and Tolstoy. He has also translated collections of short stories by Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov for Pushkin Press.
Maya Slater has translated and edited work by Molière, and edited her husband Nicolas Pasternak Slater's translations of work by Boris Pasternak. She is a Senior Research Fellow of Queen Mary University of London.