There are many remarkable things about Dostoevsky. He was the only notable Russian writer of his time who had to make a living from his writing. Almost all the others were landed gentry or high-ranking officials – Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy. Some of them enjoyed income from estates with hundreds of serfs. Because he had to keep his readers interested, he mastered the element of suspense, and might be considered the inventor of the crime novel. *Crime and Punishment* remains extremely readable more than 150 years after it was written. He was implicated in a circle of revolutionary thinkers and aritsts called the Petrashevists, and sent to a prison in Siberia where he spent 4 years in hard labour. Whilst he was in prison, he wrote down snippets of colloquial speech that he overheard from his diverse fellow inmates. He kept his scraps of paper safe from prison guards by hiding them at a nearby hospital, whose staff were sympathetic towards political exiles and writers. He was sent to the hospital frequently because of his episodes of epileptic seizures. When he left the prison after 4 years, he made a vow to himself, "I will no longer write trifles."