The Mock Execution (1849): Dostoevsky was arrested for reading banned literature and sentenced to death. He faced the firing squad, but at the last moment, his sentence was commuted to hard labor in Siberia. This traumatic event profoundly shaped his philosophical and spiritual worldview and appears in his works.

Epilepsy: Dostoevsky suffered from severe epilepsy. He experienced mystical-seeming auras before seizures, which influenced his spiritual philosophy. The main character in The Idiot (Prince Myshkin) is also epileptic.

Crime and Punishment was serialized: Published month-by-month in a literary journal, forcing readers to wait anxiously for each installment–”much like modern TV series.

Gambling Addiction: Dostoevsky struggled with severe gambling addiction, which bankrupted him multiple times. He wrote The Gambler while heavily in debt, partly to make money.

Stenographer-turned-wife: Dostoevsky married his stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who was 25 years younger. She helped organize his life and archives, proving invaluable to his later works.

The Brothers Karamazov was his last novel: Published in 1879, the year before his death. It's considered his spiritual and artistic culmination.

War and Peace length: Depending on the edition, War and Peace is between 1,000-1,400+ pages. It's one of the longest novels ever written. Some editions split it into multiple volumes.

Military service: Tolstoy served as an officer in the Russian army and fought in the Caucasus, which directly informed his writing of War and Peace and his Caucasus stories.

Spiritual conversion: In 1882, Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis and converted to a radical Christian philosophy. His later works (Resurrection, The Kreutzer Sonata, Ivan the Fool) reflect this transformation toward asceticism and social criticism.

Anna Karenina's opening: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Voted one of the greatest opening lines in literature. Sets the novel's themes perfectly.

Writing process: Tolstoy was a perfectionist who revised obsessively. War and Peace took him 5 years to write (1864-1869), and he rewrote passages countless times.

Fled his estate: Near the end of his life, Tolstoy abandoned his family and noble estate, seeking to live according to his radical Christian beliefs. He died at a railway station while running away.

Historical accuracy: Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina feature real historical figures and events woven into fictional narratives. Tolstoy's blend of history and fiction was revolutionary.