A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work. Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor
The Crocodile is an outstanding piece of satire: It is vicious, dreamlike, scatological, and one of the funniest things that Dostoevsky ever wrote. In this brief work, he reveals his hatred of communi
A pair of self-styled revolutionaries and their followers plot to overthrow the Tsar and seize control of the government in Dostoyevsky's compelling tale of ideology and murder in 19th-century Russia.
In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in rele
Alexei Ivanovich is tutor to a Russian family. They are bankrupt and eagerly awaiting the death of 'Grandmother'. Alexei falls in love twice: first, with the beautiful but impossible Polina; and secon
‘It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!’ Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of D
Underground* *The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist i
A gambler himself, both at the gaming tables and in life, Fyodor Dosteyevsky’s The Gambler was completed in time to keep the author’s debts from catching up to him. Had he not met the deadline, Dostoy
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty t
IN UNDERTAKING to describe the recent and strange incidents in our town, till lately wrapped in uneventful obscurity, I find myself forced in absence of literary skill to begin my story rather far bac
