He was born on this date in 1821.

While he was at school, his father was murdered by his own servants at the family’s small country estate.

He graduated from engineering school but chose a literary career.

He was arrested and charged with subversion because of his meetings with a group of intellectuals to discuss politics and literature. He and several of his associates were imprisoned and sentenced to death. As they were facing the firing squad, an imperial messenger arrived with the announcement that the death sentences had been commuted to four years in prison and four years of military service..

While in prison, his intense study of the New Testament, the only book the prisoners were allowed to read, contributed to his rejection of his earlier liberal political views and led him to the conviction that redemption is possible only through suffering and faith.

In 1867, he fled to Europe with his second wife to escape creditors.

He returned home and finished what many consider to be his greatest novel two months before his death in 1881

Quotes by Mr. X:

“Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.”
“It’s life that matters, nothing but life–the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.”
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.”
“If there is no God, then I am God.”
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.”

Quotes about Mr. X:

“…the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.” – Nietzsche
“. . . gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.” – Albert Einstein
“an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul” -Thomas Mann
“..the nastiest Christian I’ve ever met”.-Turgenev
“He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.” – Edwin Muir
“My husband was to me such an interesting and wholly enigmatic being, that it seemed to me as though I should find it easier to understand him if I noted down his every thought and expression.” -Mr X’s second wife
(My response to Mrs. X’s observation is: aren’t they all? But who would have time or energy to write it all down–and then try to figure it out?)

Box of Books blogger, Ella, says this author’s name should be used as a noun meaning “something or someone who excites feelings of deep sadness”. She adds, “You’d think . . . our gloomy friend would be at least semi-popular.”

Finally, I never have been able to decide how to spell his name. So who is it? And what about you? Have you read his novels? What did you think? Do you find him gloomy and sad or interesting and enigmatic–or all of the preceeding? And how do you spell his name?