Karl Ove Knausgaard in The New Yorker 100:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky began to write what would become his last novel, “The Brothers Karamazov,” in 1878. It was published in serial installments in the magazine Russkiy Vestnik from January, 1879, to November, 1880. Dostoyevsky had a deadline to meet every month, and his wife, Anna, later complained about the pressure he was always working under. Unlike many other contemporary writers, such as Tolstoy or Turgenev, who were well off, Dostoyevsky lived by his writing and struggled throughout his life to earn enough money. If not for this, Anna wrote, in her memoirs, after his death, “He could have gone carefully through [his works], polishing them, before letting them appear in print; and one can imagine how much they would have gained in beauty. Indeed, until the very end of his life Fyodor Mikhailovich had not written a single novel with which he was satisfied himself; and the cause of this was our debts!”
More here.
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