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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 01In which city was Dostoevsky born in 1821?
Moscow
Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821, on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father worked as a doctor.
Q 02Crime and Punishment was first published in twelve monthly instalments in what year?
1866
Crime and Punishment was published in 1866 in twelve monthly instalments; that same year Dostoevsky dashed off The Gambler in 26 days to meet a publisher's deadline.
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
Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker with an axe taken from the porter's lodge, carried in a loop he has sewn inside his coat.
Q 05Which detective investigates the murders in Crime and Punishment?
Porfiry Petrovich
Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate, has no hard evidence but plays cat and mouse with Raskolnikov, finally telling him outright that he knows he is the killer.
Q 06In Crime and Punishment, who is Sonya, the young woman who guides Raskolnikov toward confession?
Marmeladov's daughter
Sonya is Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, daughter of the drunken ex-clerk Marmeladov; she has turned to prostitution to feed her family and later follows Raskolnikov to Siberia.
Q 07The Brothers Karamazov was serialised from 1879 to 1880 in which journal?
The Russian Messenger
The Brothers Karamazov ran in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880, the last novel Dostoevsky completed; he was planning a sequel when he died.
Q 08The plot of The Brothers Karamazov revolves around what crime?
Patricide
The plot turns on patricide: the dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered, and his eldest son Dmitri is tried and convicted of the crime.
Q 09Which Karamazov brother tells the prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor"?
Ivan
Ivan recites his prose poem to Alyosha in a tavern: in sixteenth-century Seville a cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, arrests a 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 surname means roughly 'son of the reeking one', after his mother, the mute holy fool Stinking Lizaveta; Fyodor Pavlovich is widely assumed to be his father.
Q 11Which elder monk is Alyosha Karamazov's spiritual guide?
Father Zosima
Father Zosima, the monastery elder, is Alyosha's mentor; he was modelled partly on the elder Ambrose of Optina Monastery, whom Dostoevsky visited in 1878 after his small son's death.
Q 12Dostoevsky named Alyosha Karamazov after whom?
His son who died at three
The boy died of epilepsy, inherited from his father, in May 1878 while the novel was being written.
Q 13Who called The Brothers Karamazov "the most magnificent novel ever written"?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud wrote in his 1928 essay 'Dostoevsky and Parricide' that The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written, placing Dostoevsky not far behind Shakespeare.
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
The execution was stayed at the last moment: Tsar Nicholas I had staged the mock shooting in advance, and an aide read the reprieve while the first three condemned stood tied to the posts; the sentence became Siberian hard labour.
Q 23Dostoevsky served four years of hard labour at a prison camp in which Siberian city?
Q 14Who is the guileless prince at the centre of The Idiot?
Lev Myshkin
Prince Lev Myshkin, returning to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium, was Dostoevsky's attempt to depict 'a positively good and beautiful man', as he wrote to his niece in 1868.
Q 15Which painting erodes Rogozhin's faith in The Idiot?
Holbein's Dead Christ
A copy of Holbein's Dead Christ in the Tomb hangs in Rogozhin's house; Myshkin says it could make a man lose his faith, and Rogozhin admits it is doing exactly that to him.
Q 16Which novel did Dostoevsky consider his favourite among his own works?
The Idiot
He admitted much of it was written hurriedly but said he stood behind the idea.
Q 17Notes from Underground was first published in 1864 in which journal?
Epoch
Notes from Underground appeared in 1864 in Epoch (Epokha), the journal Dostoevsky founded with his brother Mikhail after their magazine Time (Vremya) was shut down in 1863.
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 Chernyshevsky novel does the Underground Man attack?
What Is to Be Done?
The Underground Man mocks the rational egoism and utopian optimism of Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, making the novella an assault on determinism.
Q 20Dostoevsky's first novel, published in 1846, is titled what?
Poor Folk
Poor Folk, an epistolary novel published in January 1846, made Dostoevsky famous overnight; the critic Vissarion Belinsky hailed it as Russia's first 'social novel'.
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 (1860-62) is a lightly fictionalised memoir of Dostoevsky's four years in the Omsk prison; Tolstoy called it one of the finest books in modern literature.
Q 25Which chronic medical condition did Dostoevsky suffer from throughout his life?
Epilepsy
Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy for most of his adult life, with seizures worsening during his Siberian years; he gave the condition to Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.
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 27Dostoevsky dictated The Gambler in 26 days to which stenographer, later his wife?
Anna Snitkina
Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, a 20-year-old stenographer, took down The Gambler in October 1866 and married Dostoevsky the next February; missing the deadline would have given publisher Stellovsky his works for nine years.
Q 28Which composer turned The Gambler into a 1929 opera?
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev composed The Gambler in 1915-17, revised it in 1927, and saw it premiere in Brussels in 1929. The novel is set in a German casino town called Roulettenburg.
Q 29Demons was inspired by the real murder of Ivan Ivanov by the followers of which agitator?
Sergey Nechayev
Sergey Nechayev's secret cell murdered the student Ivan Ivanov in November 1869; Dostoevsky turned the crime into the murder of a defector by a revolutionary cell in Demons.
Q 30Constance Garnett's 1916 translation popularised Demons under which English title?
The Possessed
Constance Garnett's 1916 version was titled The Possessed; later translators preferred Demons or The Devils, since the Russian Besy names the possessing spirits rather than the people possessed.