On December 23rd, 1849, a 28-year-old former military engineer stood third in line before a firing squad in St. Petersburg, dressed in a white death shirt with five minutes left to live. Seconds before the triggers were pulled, a cart tore into the square carrying a letter from the Tsar: the entire execution was staged, a choreographed piece of psychological torture. The man in the snow was Fyodor Dostoevsky, and that fracture became the raw material for the modern psychological novel.

This episode traces how an awkward outsider nicknamed Monk Fotius went from a childhood on the grounds of a Moscow hospital for the poor to overnight literary stardom, public humiliation, a radical book club that nearly cost him his life, and Siberian imprisonment, then returned to write the masterworks that shaped Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and the entire field of psychoanalysis. It ends where he did: a funeral that drew tens of thousands, and a deathbed request that says everything about what he believed.

• The mock execution: how the Tsar's staged firing squad was designed to break the Petrashevsky Circle
• A childhood spent between a poorhouse hospital garden and bedtime readings of Homer and Gothic fiction
• Poor Folk made him famous overnight; The Double got him ruthlessly cancelled weeks later
• The rumor of his father's murder, his epilepsy, and why Freud built a theory around both
• Why Nietzsche called him the only psychologist he ever learned from, and the deathbed parable he chose over his own books