Dostoevsky did publish in serials! This is related to a story. Before he finished Crime and Punishment, which was being serialized, he had to write a whole other novel in order to prevent an unscrupulous publisher from capturing the rights to all his future work. In the end he was saved by dictating The Gambler to a young woman named Anna Snitkina who was the star pupil at the local shorthand academy (shorthand being a hot innovation at the time). During the day, he would work on finishing Crime and Punishment while she worked on transcribing The Gambler. In the evenings, he would dictate the next bit of The Gambler and she would get it in shorthand. They would talk about the characters too.

They finished at the last possible moment. The publisher had cunningly closed his office that day and ordered all his staff not to receive the manuscript, so Dostoevsky went to the local police station, handed it in, and got a receipt. Thus his career was rescued. And then he and Anna got married.

It's fitting that this drama produced The Gambler (a great short book btw!), since the entire episode was a high-stakes gamble, and Dostoevsky a notorious gambling addict. The marriage was a long and happy one and his life stabilized after that. His books maybe got a tad less exciting.

Joseph Frank's biography is the best English source but he spends too many pages on this for a Google Books link to be useful. This one works though: https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=do...

Re serials: it's mind blowing that so many great masterpieces of the novel were written and published that way, and yet are so coherent, Dickens included. How on earth did they do it? The unconscious is a consummate planner.