Fyodorov was the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a peasant woman, born in 1829, and spent his life in deliberate poverty: a rented corner rather than a room, a chest to sleep on, minimal food, his salary given away, promotions declined. He refused to publish under his own name and disliked being portrayed, so both his book and his image are largely the work of other people. Tolstoy said he had never met anyone like him and Dostoevsky wrote that he agreed with the ideas as though they were his own. The book that carries the doctrine, Filosofiya obshchego dela, was assembled by the disciples Vladimir Kozhevnikov and Nikolai Peterson and printed in two volumes in 1906 and 1913, several years after his death in 1903 — and, in keeping with everything else about him, given away rather than sold.