Fyodor Dostoevsky
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47 free Fyodor Dostoevsky trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fyodor Dostoevsky stood in front of a firing squad at 28, spent four years in leg irons in Omsk, lost his wife's clothes at roulette, and still wrote Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Nietzsche called him the only psychologist he ever learned from; Freud called his last novel the most magnificent ever written. These 47 questions cover the books and the life. The easy tier asks about Raskolnikov's crime, the patricide at the heart of the Karamazovs, Prince Myshkin and the mock execution. The middle reaches Porfiry Petrovich, Father Zosima, the Grand Inquisitor, Holbein's Dead Christ, the Petrashevsky Circle, the 26-day dictation of The Gambler and Anna Snitkina's stamp collecting. The hard tier wants Epoch, Chernyshevsky, Nechayev, Eugénie Grandet, Monk Photius, Kuznetsk, the cigarette factory that funded Vremya and the manuscripts burned on a train to Berlin. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Dostoevsky's novels made Saint Petersburg their stage, but in which city was he born?
Moscow
Moscow: he grew up in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father was a doctor, and met its destitute patients while playing in the gardens.
Q 02Which novel shared a journal with Crime and Punishment during 1866?
War and Peace
War and Peace was appearing there under its first title, 1805. Dostoevsky had gone to the journal's editor only as a last resort, to ask for an advance.
Q 03Whom does Raskolnikov kill in Crime and Punishment?
A pawnbroker
Raskolnikov murders Alyona Ivanovna, an elderly pawnbroker, and then kills her half-sister Lizaveta when she walks in on the crime.
Q 04What weapon does Raskolnikov use in Crime and Punishment?
An axe
An axe, taken from the porter's room and hung from a loop he has sewn inside his overcoat, so that he can carry it through the streets unseen.
Q 05Which detective investigates the murders in Crime and Punishment?
Porfiry Petrovich
Porfiry Petrovich has no proof, so he plays cat and mouse with Raskolnikov instead, and finally tells him to his face that he knows who the killer is.
Q 06In Crime and Punishment, who is Sonya, the young woman who guides Raskolnikov toward confession?
Marmeladov's daughter
Marmeladov's daughter sells herself to feed her drunken father's family. She reads Raskolnikov the raising of Lazarus, then follows him to Siberia.
Q 07In "The Grand Inquisitor", how does the silent Christ finally answer the cardinal who condemns him?
With a kiss
With a kiss on the old man's bloodless lips, after which the cardinal lets him go. When the tale ends, Alyosha kisses its teller in the same way.
Q 08The plot of The Brothers Karamazov revolves around what crime?
Patricide
Patricide: the dissolute Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered and his eldest son Dmitri is convicted, though the novel shows that another man struck the blow.
Q 09Which Karamazov brother tells the prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor"?
Ivan
Ivan, the intellectual middle brother, tells it to Alyosha over a tavern table: a cardinal arrests the returned Christ for burdening mankind with free will.
Q 10Who is the rumoured illegitimate Karamazov son who serves as his father's servant?
Smerdyakov
Smerdyakov's name means roughly "son of the reeking one": it was coined from the nickname of his mother, a mute homeless woman known as Stinking Lizaveta.
Q 11Which elder monk is Alyosha Karamazov's spiritual guide?
Father Zosima
Father Zosima dies midway through the novel, and instead of the miracle the town expects, his body quickly begins to smell, a scandal that shakes Alyosha's faith.
Q 12Dostoevsky named Alyosha Karamazov after whom?
His son who died in childhood
His son who died in childhood: little Alexei, known as Alyosha, died in May 1878 as the novel was taking shape, and the grieving father went on pilgrimage to Optina Monastery.
Q 13Who called The Brothers Karamazov "the most magnificent novel ever written"?
Sigmund Freud
Q 21Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 for belonging to which discussion group?
The Petrashevsky Circle
Dostoevsky was arrested in April 1849 as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, young intellectuals who met to discuss banned writings; he had read Belinsky's Letter to Gogol aloud to them.
Q 22What happened at Dostoevsky's scheduled execution by firing squad in December 1849?
It was stayed at the last moment
It was stayed at the last moment, by design: Tsar Nicholas I had made the mock execution part of the punishment, and the reprieve came only once the first three men were tied to the posts.
Q 23Dostoevsky served four years of hard labour at a prison camp in which Siberian city?
Sigmund Freud said so in a 1928 essay that ranked Dostoevsky just behind Shakespeare as a writer, then went on to psychoanalyse the novelist himself.
Q 14Who is the guileless prince at the centre of The Idiot?
Lev Myshkin
Lev Myshkin, home from a Swiss sanatorium, was Dostoevsky's attempt to portray "the positively good and beautiful man". His goodness brings ruin to nearly everyone he tries to help.
Q 15Which painting erodes Rogozhin's faith in The Idiot?
Holbein's Dead Christ
Holbein's Dead Christ transfixed Dostoevsky himself in 1867: his wife had to lead him away from the panel. In the novel a copy hangs in Rogozhin's house, and the prince says a man could lose his faith over it.
Q 16Which fellow novelist did Dostoevsky caricature in Demons as the vain, fading writer Karmazinov?
Turgenev
Turgenev had helped circulate a mocking poem about the touchy young Dostoevsky in the 1840s. The preening Karmazinov, a generation later, was the payback.
Q 17Dostoevsky's first published work was his translation of a novel by which French writer?
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, which he rendered freely and with heightened emotion in 1843. Balzac's fiction went on to shape his own.
Q 18Notes from Underground is often cited as one of the first works of which movement?
Existentialism
Notes from Underground is widely called a founding text of existentialism; its narrator, a retired civil servant, rails against the rationalist idea that life reduces to 'two times two makes four'.
Q 19Which Russian novel's rational utopia does Dostoevsky's Underground Man set out to attack?
What Is to Be Done?
What Is to Be Done?, Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel, taught that enlightened self-interest would build a perfect society. The Underground Man retorts that people would wreck it just to feel free.
Q 20Dostoevsky's first novel, published in 1846, is titled what?
Poor Folk
Poor Folk, a novel in letters, made him a celebrity overnight: the poet Nekrasov rushed the manuscript to the critic Belinsky, announcing, "A new Gogol has appeared!"
Omsk
Dostoevsky served his sentence from 1850 to 1854 in the prison fortress at Omsk; the only book he was allowed was a New Testament given to him by Decembrist wives at Tobolsk.
Q 24Which novel drew on Dostoevsky's years in the Siberian prison camp?
The House of the Dead
The House of the Dead, a lightly fictionalised memoir of his four years among convicts, began Russia's tradition of prison-camp writing. Tolstoy thought it his masterpiece.
Q 25Which chronic medical condition did Dostoevsky suffer from for most of his adult life?
Epilepsy
Epilepsy struck Dostoevsky hard from his prison years on. He described the instant before a fit as a flash of perfect harmony, and gave the illness to several of his characters.
Q 26Dostoevsky's ruinous addiction was to which casino game?
Roulette
Dostoevsky's addiction was to roulette, which he played compulsively at German spa casinos such as Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden through the 1860s before giving up gambling in 1871.
Q 27Which novel did Dostoevsky dictate in under a month to a young stenographer he then married?
The Gambler
The Gambler was due by 1 November 1866, or a publisher would win the right to print all his work unpaid for nine years. Dictating, he finished in 26 days.
Q 28Which composer turned Dostoevsky's short casino novel into an opera first staged in 1929?
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev finished the score in 1917, but the planned Russian production fell apart after the February Revolution. The opera waited twelve years for its premiere, in Brussels.
Q 29Demons was inspired by the real murder of the student Ivanov by the followers of which agitator?
Sergey Nechayev
Sergey Nechayev's secret cell murdered the student Ivanov, a former comrade, in November 1869. Dostoevsky turned the crime into the killing of a defector by a revolutionary cell in Demons.
Q 30Constance Garnett's translation popularised Demons under which English title?
The Possessed
The Possessed was Garnett's choice. Later translators prefer Demons or The Devils, arguing that the Russian title names the spirits doing the possessing, not their victims.