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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Greatest Works of Dostoevsky," readers encounter a compelling anthology that showcases the philosophical and psychological depth characteristic of Dostoevsky's oeuvre. Spanning seminal works such as "Crime and Punishment," "The Brothers Karamazov," and "The Idiot," this collection delves into the intricacies of human morality, the existential struggle, and the quest for redemption. Utilizing a stylistic approach that melds vivid character development with profound moral dilemmas, Dostoevsky invites readers into the labyrinth of human consciousness, reflecting the tumultuous socio-political context of 19th-century Russia. Fyodor Dostoevsky, a luminary of world literature, drew from his tumultuous life experiences, including personal loss and political imprisonment, which profoundly influenced his exploration of faith and nihilism. His profound understanding of the human psyche, coupled with his own struggles against despair, informed his ability to articulate the complexities of existential angst. Dostoevsky's writings offer a discourse that resonates even today, encouraging readers to confront their own beliefs and the moral fabric of society. This anthology is highly recommended for readers who wish to engage with the fundamental questions of existence and morality. Dostoevsky's unparalleled insight into the human condition not only enlightens but also challenges, making his works essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of life's most pressing philosophical questions. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Greatest Works of Dostoevsky
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles six of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most influential prose fictions—Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from Underground, The Gambler, and Demons (also known as The Possessed or The Devils)—to present a concentrated portrait of his mature achievement. Written between 1864 and 1880, these works chart the evolution of a writer who transformed the novel into a laboratory for moral, psychological, and metaphysical inquiry. The aim here is not to be exhaustive but to gather landmark texts that together dramatize the crises of conscience, belief, and freedom that defined Dostoevsky’s vision and continue to animate readers across languages and generations.
The volumes included are long-form narrative prose: four major novels, one shorter novel, and one novella. They encompass psychological, philosophical, and social fiction, with strains of satire, melodrama, and suspense woven throughout. Where present, paratexts such as a translator’s preface frame the reading experience, but the core of the collection is narrative. There are no poems, plays, or letters here; instead, the set concentrates the author’s most celebrated experiments in the novelistic form. Many of these works entered the world in nineteenth‑century periodicals before book publication, and their sectional architecture reflects that history while remaining fully realized as books.
Each work offers a distinct entry point into Dostoevsky’s concerns. Notes from Underground inaugurates the confessional voice of a solitary narrator wrestling with reason, pride, and humiliation. Crime and Punishment follows a desperate student in a city crisis who crosses a moral threshold and confronts the consequences. The Idiot introduces a guileless prince whose innocence tests a corrosive social milieu. The Gambler traces a tutor’s entanglement with chance and compulsion. Demons depicts ideological intrigue destabilizing a provincial town. The Brothers Karamazov culminates these inquiries in a family drama that unfolds into searching debates and a public ordeal.
What unites these books is their pioneering psychological depth. Dostoevsky privileges interiority—confession, fevered reflection, and charged dialogue—over external description. His narrators and characters speak with immediacy, often circling their own motives, reversing positions, and exposing contradictions. The result is not a single authorial verdict but a living contest of perspectives that compels readers to weigh competing moral claims. Extreme emotional states—terror, shame, exaltation, compassion—are not sensational ends but instruments of analysis, pressing characters to reveal what they believe about freedom, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption under pressure.
Freedom and moral responsibility form a central axis throughout. Characters repeatedly test the limits of will: Can one choose beyond interest, beyond rational calculation, or even against one’s own good? The works dramatize collisions between utilitarian reasoning and the stubborn promptings of conscience, between abstract schemes and the unpredictable dignity of persons. Punishment may be legal, psychological, or spiritual; redemption, where sought, is never automatic. By staging transgression and confession side by side, Dostoevsky examines how guilt can deform or transform, and how genuine responsibility requires not only acknowledgment of a deed but recognition of the other’s irreducible worth.
Faith and doubt receive equally probing treatment. These narratives do not deliver simple pieties or dismissals; they dramatize argument. Moments of prayer, skepticism, and defiance appear in the same pages, often voiced by characters equally intelligent and compelling. The problem of suffering—especially innocent suffering—recurs as an open question, addressed through parable, debate, and ordinary acts of mercy. Religious imagery and monastic traditions enter the novels not as ornament but as living contexts for ethical decision. The result is a body of work that neither evades metaphysical questions nor resolves them cheaply, trusting readers to hold the tension.
These novels also scrutinize their historical moment. Urban poverty, debt, and bureaucratic inertia press upon individuals already at a moral brink. Ideological movements, from radical negation to fashionable enlightenment, promise liberation yet risk reducing persons to instruments. Demons, in particular, presents the social consequences of nihilistic conspiracies, while other texts trace subtler pressures—status, gossip, and financial precarity—that can coerce choices. The Gambler shows how chance and credit can become tyrannies of their own. Throughout, social critique is inseparable from character: systems matter here because they shape and are shaped by human souls.
Stylistically, these works are dialogic and polyphonic, orchestrating multiple voices without collapsing them into a single thesis. Letters within the narrative, embedded tales, dreams, and courtroom scenes diversify the modes of storytelling. Irony and the grotesque operate alongside earnest spiritual search, producing a tone that can pivot from comedy to catastrophe within a page. The pacing, often driven by deadlines of the plot—debts coming due, visits scheduled, rumors spreading—creates a charged temporality that keeps philosophy and action intertwined. Repetition, sudden reversals, and set‑piece confrontations intensify the ethical stakes without sacrificing narrative momentum.
Place functions as more than backdrop. The city—frequently oppressive, damp, and crowded—becomes a moral climate where hunger, noise, and anonymity grind against conscience. Provincial towns amplify rumor and surveillance, trapping individuals in webs of expectation. European resort spaces, with their casinos and drawing rooms, render desire quantifiable and luck theatrical. Interiors—boarding houses, cramped rooms, parlors—enclose characters in close quarters where words wound and heal. Such settings heighten the contrast between private turmoil and public performance, making the geography of each novel a map of temptation, exposure, and the elusive promise of renewal.
Although the collection is selective, it spans the decisive arc of Dostoevsky’s late career, when his narrative art and philosophical urgency converged. The works were shaped amid the upheavals of reform‑era Russia, and by the author’s intimate knowledge of hardship and censorship. Yet their reach far exceeds local circumstances. By forging a form where ethical deliberation becomes dramatic action, these books expanded what the novel could do. Their influence has been pervasive in later literature and thought, not through programmatic doctrine but through a method: searching dialogue, moral risk, and an uncompromising attention to the mystery of motive.
Readers will find here both coherence and range. The texts can be approached individually—each is a complete artistic world—or read together as a conversation unfolding across years. One might begin with the compact ferocity of Notes from Underground, proceed to the urban crucible of Crime and Punishment, and then sample the social and ideological panoramas of The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, with The Gambler as a concentrated study in compulsion. Whatever the path, the collection invites sustained attention to voice, argument, and the small acts of grace and betrayal that tilt destinies.
The lasting significance of these works lies in their refusal to simplify. They ask how a person becomes responsible, how love can survive humiliation, and what freedom costs when severed from truth. They show that ideas are not abstractions but forces that heal or harm when lived. They place readers in the courtroom of conscience and leave the verdict genuinely contested. Brought together, these novels and novella offer a panoramic yet intimate view of human striving, failure, and hope—an enduring testament to the novel as a form equal to the most difficult questions of the modern soul.
Author Biography
Introduction
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, journalist, and thinker whose work reshaped the modern novel. Born in 1821 and active through the turbulent mid- to late nineteenth century, he produced psychological and philosophical fiction that interrogates guilt, freedom, faith, and the social upheavals of his era. His major works include Poor Folk, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons (also translated as The Possessed), The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov, as well as the memoiristic Notes from the House of the Dead and the polemical Diary of a Writer. His influence spans literature, philosophy, and psychology worldwide.
Education and Literary Influences
Raised in Moscow and educated in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky trained as an engineer before devoting himself to literature. In the late 1830s he entered the imperial military engineering academy, where he studied mathematics and fortifications while reading voraciously beyond the curriculum. By the early 1840s he had left government service, translated Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, and circulated among literary circles. This technical education, combined with broad self-directed reading in European and Russian letters, gave him a disciplined approach to structure and an enduring fascination with the interplay of material conditions, moral choice, and metaphysical questions that would animate his fiction.
Several writers decisively shaped his imagination. From Pushkin and Gogol he absorbed the possibilities of a distinctly Russian prose, sympathetic to the poor yet alert to grotesque comedy. From European Romantics and realists—Schiller, Balzac, and later Dickens—he learned dramatic moral dilemmas, social observation, and episodic architecture. The radical critic Vissarion Belinsky championed his early work, pressing him toward sharper social critique. Participation in the Petrashevsky Circle exposed him to utopian socialism and to debates about religion and reform. Over time, deep engagement with the Bible and Orthodox theology redirected his concerns toward sin, redemption, and the mystery of human freedom.
Literary Career
Dostoevsky’s literary debut came in the mid-1840s with Poor Folk, an epistolary novel about impoverished clerks that brought immediate acclaim and Belinsky’s endorsement. The Double and other early experiments explored fractured consciousness but drew mixed reviews. In the late 1840s he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, was arrested for political discussion, and famously faced a staged execution before his sentence was commuted. He spent years in a Siberian prison camp and then in enforced military service. This ordeal transformed his artistic outlook, deepening his interest in suffering, moral regeneration, and the spiritual life of common people.
After release, Dostoevsky gradually returned to print. Notes from the House of the Dead, based on his penal experience, appeared in the early 1860s and profoundly affected Russian readers. He also published The Insulted and Injured and, with his brother Mikhail, founded the journal Vremya, which serialized fiction and public commentary before being closed by censors. A successor journal, Epokha, followed for a short time. These editorial ventures sharpened his sense of the reading public and the pressures of serialization, training him to weave philosophical debate, crime plots, and city life into propulsive narratives.
Notes from Underground, issued in the mid-1860s, announced a new, prophetic voice: a tormented narrator who rails against rational egoism and the dream of a perfectly engineered society. Crime and Punishment soon followed, its feverish portrait of a student murderer captivating a broad audience and establishing Dostoevsky as a master of psychological suspense. Under intense financial pressure, he dictated The Gambler on a tight deadline to a young stenographer who later became his wife, turning his own gambling addiction into art. These works refined his method of probing conscience through dramatic confrontations and confessions.
During travels across Europe to escape creditors, he conceived novels of ambitious moral scope. The Idiot presented an almost saintly protagonist adrift in worldly intrigues, while Demons (also translated as The Possessed) depicted the destructive energies of extremist politics and spiritual voids. In the 1870s he launched Diary of a Writer, a hybrid of reportage, essays, and stories that made him a national voice. The period’s controversies—reform, nihilism, and Russia’s path—entered his fiction, whose intricate plots joined crime, love, and metaphysical argument.
The Adolescent consolidated themes of generational conflict and the search for a moral center in a rapidly changing society. By the mid-1870s Dostoevsky was widely recognized across the Russian Empire, his serials avidly followed, his ideas debated by conservatives and radicals alike. Though critics sometimes challenged his polemics or melodramatic turns, many acknowledged the unprecedented intensity of his psychological portrayal. He increasingly combined the sensational momentum of popular fiction with searching analyses of faith, doubt, and responsibility, building toward a synthesis that would culminate in his final, most expansive novel.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Dostoevsky’s core convictions crystallized around Orthodox Christianity, the sacred dignity of the person, and the necessity of moral freedom. His experience of imprisonment and a near-execution intensified his opposition to dehumanizing punishment and his fascination with repentance and grace. He distrusted utilitarian schemes that reduced people to numbers and rejected the notion that reason alone could secure happiness. In his novels he dramatized compassion for society’s outcasts and explored how love, suffering, and responsibility can transform a life, proposing artistic testimony rather than programmatic doctrine.
Politically and culturally, he moved from youthful sympathy for Western utopian ideas toward a more conservative, nationalist stance grounded in Orthodoxy and a belief in the historical mission of the Russian people. Through Diary of a Writer and public interventions he argued against nihilism and what he saw as corrosive materialism, urging spiritual renewal and social solidarity. His celebrated address on Pushkin, delivered near the end of his life, envisioned reconciliation across classes and factions through a shared culture. The tensions and contradictions of these commitments animate his characters and keep debates within his work alive.
Final Years & Legacy
In the late 1870s Dostoevsky reached the height of his authority. The Brothers Karamazov, serialized in 1879–1880, wove together parricide, courtroom drama, and philosophical dialogue to present his most comprehensive meditation on belief and doubt. A widely discussed address honoring Pushkin in 1880 confirmed his stature as a moral voice in Russian public life. He died in 1881 in St. Petersburg, and his funeral drew large crowds, reflecting the depth of public engagement with his work. Contemporaries recognized both his artistic audacity and his searching moral seriousness.
His legacy has been vast and enduring. Novelists and thinkers across the twentieth century—among them Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, and Camus—engaged with his explorations of guilt, freedom, and the unconscious. His psychological realism and dramatic dialogic form helped shape modernist narrative and existential philosophy, while his depictions of crime, punishment, and redemption resonated with emerging psychological theories. Translated worldwide, his books remain central to curricula and public debate, adapted for stage and screen, and revisited in times of moral and political crisis. Today he stands as a foundational figure of world literature.
Historical Context
Between 1864 and 1880, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (born 1821, Moscow; died 1881, St. Petersburg) produced the novels collected here: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Gambler (1867), The Idiot (1868–69), Demons (1871–72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). Their shared backdrop is the Russian Empire’s turbulent mid-century transformation under Nicholas I and Alexander II, when defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), rapid urbanization, and sweeping reforms unsettled every institution. In this upheaval, St. Petersburg’s tenements, courts, seminaries, barracks, and gambling rooms became microcosms of a society veering between liberal optimism and spiritual crisis, a dialectic Dostoevsky dramatized obsessively.
Born to a military hospital physician, Mikhail Dostoevsky, and Maria Nechaeva, Dostoevsky grew up on the grounds of Moscow’s Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, an environment that sharpened his feel for the destitute. Educated at the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering (1838–43), he mastered draftsmanship and discipline while devouring Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, and Gogol. His breakout Poor Folk (1846) attached him to the Natural School and critic Vissarion Belinsky. The literary capital of Nicholas I’s Russia—censorship-heavy yet teeming with feuilletons—taught him the periodical rhythms that later governed his mature serial novels and the psychologically claustrophobic, room-bound settings pervasive in these works.
In the late 1840s, he frequented Mikhail Petrashevsky’s circle, where civil servants, officers, and writers debated Fourierist socialism, censorship, and serf emancipation. On 23 April 1849, police arrested the group; on 22 December, in Semyonovsky Square, twenty prisoners, including Dostoevsky, were led before a firing squad, then reprieved at the last instant by order of Nicholas I. Sentenced to four years of hard labor in Omsk (1850–54) and then to military service in Semipalatinsk, he emerged convinced that moral regeneration, not abstract systems, saved men. The trauma of the mock execution—terror, reprieve, gratitude—echoes throughout crises of conscience and rebirth staged in these novels.
Siberian penal life immersed Dostoevsky among peasants, Old Believers, soldiers, and criminals from across the empire, a human archive later recomposed in Notes from the House of the Dead (1861–62). In the stockade, he was allowed only the New Testament. That Gospel, carried thereafter in his coat, informed his treatment of guilt, forgiveness, and kenotic love, themes central to every book in this collection. After hard labor he served in the Seventh Line Battalion in Semipalatinsk (1854–59), married the widow Maria Isaeva (1857), and, amnestied by Alexander II, returned to St. Petersburg in 1859—scarred, debt-ridden, and ideologically altered, yet artistically galvanized.
The Crimean War exposed imperial backwardness and precipitated Alexander II’s Great Reforms: emancipation of the serfs in 1861; judiciary reform in 1864; overhaul of local governance and the military. These changes reframed the moral landscape Dostoevsky explored. Emancipation created peasant communes (mir) burdened by redemption payments, loosening traditional bonds while failing to deliver prosperity. Judicial openness intensified public fascination with crime, motive, and testimony. Censorship softened, then hardened episodically. The result was an atmosphere in which students, clerks, impoverished nobles, and former serfs pressed into new, unstable roles—precisely the experiential strata from which his murderers, saints, gamblers, fanatics, and outcasts are drawn.
St. Petersburg, Russia’s window to Europe, furnished the geography of alienation. Rapid growth, canals, fog, and summer white nights created a spectral cityscape. The Haymarket, Sennaya Ploshchad, and back-street tenements housed pawnbrokers, drinking dens, and lodging houses where the disinherited negotiated honor and debt. Inflation, cholera scares, and the spread of cheap print intensified anxiety. Clerks traversed endless stairwells; policemen, investigating magistrates, and charity committees patrolled new urban territories. This modern, bureaucratic labyrinth—at once European and sui generis—became the laboratory for Dostoevsky’s moral experiments, a setting equally suited to philosophical monologue, extortionate bargaining, and moments of sudden grace.
The moral-intellectual battlefield of the 1860s pitted Westernizers against Slavophiles. Belinsky and Herzen espoused European progress and secular ethics; Khomiakov and Kireevsky championed Orthodoxy and sobornost, the organic community. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863) codified utilitarian rational egoism and the new man, while Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) popularized nihilism. Dostoevsky’s rejoinders—first programmatically in Notes from Underground (1864) and then across the later novels—attacked deterministic reason, defended the primacy of freedom even to self-destruction, and probed the possibility of a specifically Russian synthesis of faith, compassion, and historical responsibility.
Periodical culture determined both form and readership. With his brother Mikhail he edited Vremya (Time, 1861–63) and Epokha (Epoch, 1864–65), journals promoting pochvennichestvo, a reconciliation of the intelligentsia with national soil. Vremya was closed in 1863 after an article on the Polish question offended authorities. Thereafter, major novels appeared serially in Mikhail Katkov’s conservative Russkii Vestnik (The Russian Messenger): Crime and Punishment in 1866, The Idiot in 1868–69, Demons in 1871–72, The Brothers Karamazov in 1879–80. Serialization imposed cliffhangers, multiple plot-lines, and digressive essays, shaping the architecture and argumentative cadence shared by the works in this volume.
Debt and gambling were not mere motifs but biographical imperatives. After European trips in 1862 and 1863, Dostoevsky spent 1867–71 largely abroad—Geneva, Dresden, Baden-Baden, Homburg, Wiesbaden—haunting roulette rooms whose rules, rhythms, and delusions he knew intimately. In 1865 he signed a punishing contract with publisher F. T. Stellovsky obliging him to deliver a novel by 1 November 1866 or forfeit copyrights for nine years. He dictated The Gambler in twenty-six days to a young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, whom he married in February 1867. Their partnership stabilized his finances and workflow and underwrote the subsequent major novels.
Personal losses pressed onto the page. His father’s violent death in 1839 (in circumstances still disputed), his mother’s in 1837, the deaths in 1864 of his first wife Maria and his brother Mikhail, and later the death of his infant daughter Sonya in Geneva (1868) and his beloved son Alyosha in 1878, deepened his fixation on suffering, atonement, and family fracture. Epilepsy—documented from the 1840s—gave him intimate knowledge of aura and aftermath, enabling uncanny depictions of ecstatic illumination and abject collapse. Such experiences sit behind the confessions, courtroom breakdowns, mystical visitations, and fragile acts of mercy common to these novels.
The period’s ferocious engagement with science and secular philosophy sharpened his polemical edge. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Auguste Comte’s positivism, Ludwig Buchner’s materialism, and the utilitarian calculus of Bentham and Mill circulated through Russian journals. In physiology and psychiatry, new theories of the brain promised mechanical explanations for conscience and belief. Dostoevsky treated these currents not as straw men but as seductive temptations: the will reduced to arithmetic, virtue to hygiene. His characters test these hypotheses against lived suffering, arguing over whether freedom, responsibility, and love survive when man is conceived as a programmable organism.
Judicial reform in 1864 created independent courts, trial by jury, and an adversarial bar—public spectacles avidly reported in the press. Contemporary Russian readers expected investigative magistrates, prosecutorial rhetoric, forensic detail, and the moral theater of confession and cross-examination. Dostoevsky absorbed the cadences of the courtroom, attended trials, and listened to police talk. The figure of the following magistrate, the pressure of pre-trial detention, the social staging of an inquest, and the psychological chess between suspect and investigator became dramatic engines across his fiction, allowing him to ask whether truth emerges from fact, from conscience, or from grace.
Emancipation reconfigured the people whose moral reserve Dostoevsky revered. The village commune (mir), parish life, and popular piety persisted beneath fiscal burdens and migration to cities. Pilgrimage, ikon-veneration, and the figure of the starets (spiritual elder) offered alternatives to bureaucratic or utilitarian order. Dostoevsky’s visits to Optina Pustyn monastery, culminating in 1878 encounters with the celebrated Elder Amvrosy, reinforced his conviction that Russia’s redemption lay in kenotic humility and mutual service. That sensibility permeates his portrayals of humble truth-tellers, Christian fools, and repentant sinners, who stand as rebukes to prideful rationalism and to aristocratic or revolutionary contempt.
Foreign policy crises sharpened his polemics. The January Uprising in Poland (1863) strained empire and press; the Balkan Eastern Question and Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) stirred pan-Slavic sentiment and Orthodox solidarity with Serbs and Bulgarians. In his Diary of a Writer (especially 1873–77), he denounced European realpolitik, criticized Catholic authoritarianism, and warned against cosmopolitan abstractions that ignored the poor. The parable of Rome versus Jerusalem, authority versus freedom, threads through his work, climaxing in reflections on inquisitorial power, temptation, and the human longing to surrender freedom in exchange for bread, miracle, and unity.
Domestic radicalism escalated from satire to blood. Dmitry Karakozov’s attempted assassination of Alexander II on 4 April 1866 inaugurated a decade of conspiratorial cells and police countermeasures. The 1869 Nechaev affair—the murder of student Ivan Ivanov by a revolutionary circle in Moscow—exposed the psychology of terror, manipulation, and ethical nihilism. Show trials in the early 1870s dramatized doctrinal fanaticism and state hysteria. Dostoevsky transmuted this climate into composite portraits of agitators, ideologues, and the vacuums of meaning they exploit, exploring how metaphysical despair, wounded vanity, and provincial boredom could be weaponized into political apocalypse.
His Russian prose fused high rhetorical argument with demotic street-talk, a polyphony influenced by Pushkin’s clarity and Gogol’s grotesque. Translation and travel expanded his palette: he translated Balzac; he read Schiller, Hugo, and Dickens; he toured Paris and London in 1862, recording impressions of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the dehumanizing uniformity of capitalist spectacle in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863). Such encounters colored his ambivalence toward Europe’s promises and perils. Yet the novels’ dialogic form—voices arguing without final authorial decree—owes as much to the constraints and freedoms of serial publication as to any manifesto.
In the late 1870s Dostoevsky became a public sage. His monthly Diary of a Writer blended reportage, theology, and polemic, while he composed The Brothers Karamazov in serial form (1879–80). On 8 June 1880, his electrifying Pushkin Speech at Moscow’s monument unveiling proposed a messianic role for Russia grounded in universal sympathy. He died in St. Petersburg on 9 February 1881 (28 January O.S.), days before the assassination of Alexander II by the People’s Will. The novels gathered here were born from that century’s interlocking storms—reform and reaction, science and faith, poverty and pride—whose unresolved tensions they preserve.
Synopsis (Selection)
Crime and Punishment
A destitute ex-student in St. Petersburg commits a calculated murder and is consumed by guilt, paranoia, and moral reckoning as a persistent investigator closes in. The novel examines conscience, alienation, and the possibility of redemption.
The Brothers Karamazov
Three very different brothers clash with their debauched father and with one another as a sensational crime and public trial expose conflicts of faith, reason, and passion. The book probes moral responsibility, free will, and the problem of suffering.
The Idiot
The guileless Prince Myshkin returns to Russia and, through his candor and compassion, becomes entangled in a volatile rivalry and a destructive love triangle that unsettles high society. It explores innocence amid corruption and the costs of ideal goodness.
Notes from Underground
An embittered former civil servant delivers a fierce critique of rationalist utopias and human predictability, then recounts humiliating encounters that reveal his self-sabotage. It is both a philosophical attack on rational egoism and a portrait of alienated consciousness.
The Gambler
A young tutor at a German spa becomes obsessed with roulette while navigating shifting loyalties, romantic entanglements, and precarious family finances. The narrative depicts compulsion, risk, and the lure and ruin of sudden fortune.
Demons (The Possessed / The Devils)
A circle of radical conspirators exploits a provincial town, igniting scandals, fanaticism, and violence that engulf the community. The novel portrays ideological extremism and the unraveling of social and moral order.
The Greatest Works of Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment + The Brother's Karamazov + The Idiot + Notes from Underground + The Gambler + Demons (The Possessed / The Devils)
Crime and Punishment
Translator’s Preface
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 that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.
Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, “Poor Folk.”
This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.
Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of “taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press.” Under Nicholas I. (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: “They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives.” The sentence was commuted to hard labour.
One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity.
The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the “Dead House,” and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.
He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal — “Vremya,” which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started another journal —“The Epoch,” which within a few months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.
In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour.
A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who “gave the hapless man the funeral of a king.” He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.
In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: “He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom ... that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.”
Part I
Chapter I
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.
This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie — no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.
This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.
“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,” he thought, with an odd smile. “Hm ... yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. ... But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking ... of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.”
The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer — all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted food.
He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man’s heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German hatter” bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him — the young man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.
“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable. ... It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable. ... With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered. ... What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible. ... Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that always ruin everything ...”
He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this “hideous” dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a “rehearsal” of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.
With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house which on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the street. This house was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by working people of all kinds — tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best they could, petty clerks, etc. There was a continual coming and going through the two gates and in the two courtyards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.
“If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?” he could not help asking himself as he reached the fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by a German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. “That’s a good thing anyway,” he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him. ... He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.
“Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,” the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
“I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here,” the old woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.
“And here ... I am again on the same errand,” Raskolnikov continued, a little disconcerted and surprised at the old woman’s mistrust. “Perhaps she is always like that though, only I did not notice it the other time,” he thought with an uneasy feeling.
The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side, and pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass in front of her:
“Step in, my good sir.”
The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun.
“So the sun will shine like this then too!” flashed as it were by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement. But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands — that was all. In the corner a light was burning before a small ikon. Everything was very clean; the floor and the furniture were brightly polished; everything shone.
“Lizaveta’s work,” thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust to be seen in the whole flat.
“It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,” Raskolnikov thought again, and he stole a curious glance at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in which stood the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers and into which he had never looked before. These two rooms made up the whole flat.
“What do you want?” the old woman said severely, coming into the room and, as before, standing in front of him so as to look him straight in the face.
“I’ve brought something to pawn here,” and he drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned flat silver watch, on the back of which was engraved a globe; the chain was of steel.
“But the time is up for your last pledge. The month was up the day before yesterday.”
“I will bring you the interest for another month; wait a little.”
“But that’s for me to do as I please, my good sir, to wait or to sell your pledge at once.”
“How much will you give me for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?”
“You come with such trifles, my good sir, it’s scarcely worth anything. I gave you two roubles last time for your ring and one could buy it quite new at a jeweler’s for a rouble and a half.”
“Give me four roubles for it, I shall redeem it, it was my father’s. I shall be getting some money soon.”
“A rouble and a half, and interest in advance, if you like!”
“A rouble and a half!” cried the young man.
“Please yourself”— and the old woman handed him back the watch. The young man took it, and was so angry that he was on the point of going away; but checked himself at once, remembering that there was nowhere else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.
“Hand it over,” he said roughly.
The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind the curtain into the other room. The young man, left standing alone in the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers.
“It must be the top drawer,” he reflected. “So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring. ... And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers ... then there must be some other chest or strong-box ... that’s worth knowing. Strong-boxes always have keys like that ... but how degrading it all is.”
The old woman came back.
“Here, sir: as we say ten copecks the rouble a month, so I must take fifteen copecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty copecks on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five copecks altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen copecks for the watch. Here it is.”
“What! only a rouble and fifteen copecks now!”
“Just so.”
The young man did not dispute it and took the money. He looked at the old woman, and was in no hurry to get away, as though there was still something he wanted to say or to do, but he did not himself quite know what.
“I may be bringing you something else in a day or two, Alyona Ivanovna — a valuable thing — silver — a cigarette-box, as soon as I get it back from a friend . . .” he broke off in confusion.
“Well, we will talk about it then, sir.”
“Good-bye — are you always at home alone, your sister is not here with you?” He asked her as casually as possible as he went out into the passage.
“What business is she of yours, my good sir?”
“Oh, nothing particular, I simply asked. You are too quick. ... Good-day, Alyona Ivanovna.”
Raskolnikov went out in complete confusion. This confusion became more and more intense. As he went down the stairs, he even stopped short, two or three times, as though suddenly struck by some thought. When he was in the street he cried out, “Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly. ... No, it’s nonsense, it’s rubbish!” he added resolutely. “And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!— and for a whole month I’ve been ... .” But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern which was entered by steps leading from the pavement to the basement. At that instant two drunken men came out at the door, and abusing and supporting one another, they mounted the steps. Without stopping to think, Raskolnikov went down the steps at once. Till that moment he had never been into a tavern, but now he felt giddy and was tormented by a burning thirst. He longed for a drink of cold beer, and attributed his sudden weakness to the want of food. He sat down at a sticky little table in a dark and dirty corner; ordered some beer, and eagerly drank off the first glassful. At once he felt easier; and his thoughts became clear.
“All that’s nonsense,” he said hopefully, “and there is nothing in it all to worry about! It’s simply physical derangement. Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread — and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!”
But in spite of this scornful reflection, he was by now looking cheerful as though he were suddenly set free from a terrible burden: and he gazed round in a friendly way at the people in the room. But even at that moment he had a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was also not normal.
There were few people at the time in the tavern. Besides the two drunken men he had met on the steps, a group consisting of about five men and a girl with a concertina had gone out at the same time. Their departure left the room quiet and rather empty. The persons still in the tavern were a man who appeared to be an artisan, drunk, but not extremely so, sitting before a pot of beer, and his companion, a huge, stout man with a grey beard, in a short full-skirted coat. He was very drunk: and had dropped asleep on the bench; every now and then, he began as though in his sleep, cracking his fingers, with his arms wide apart and the upper part of his body bounding about on the bench, while he hummed some meaningless refrain, trying to recall some such lines as these:
“His wife a year he fondly loved His wife a — a year he — fondly loved.”
Or suddenly waking up again:
“Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.”
But no one shared his enjoyment: his silent companion looked with positive hostility and mistrust at all these manifestations. There was another man in the room who looked somewhat like a retired government clerk. He was sitting apart, now and then sipping from his pot and looking round at the company. He, too, appeared to be in some agitation.
Chapter II
Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided society of every sort, more especially of late. But now all at once he felt a desire to be with other people. Something new seemed to be taking place within him, and with it he felt a sort of thirst for company. He was so weary after a whole month of concentrated wretchedness and gloomy excitement that he longed to rest, if only for a moment, in some other world, whatever it might be; and, in spite of the filthiness of the surroundings, he was glad now to stay in the tavern.
The master of the establishment was in another room, but he frequently came down some steps into the main room, his jaunty, tarred boots with red turn-over tops coming into view each time before the rest of his person. He wore a full coat and a horribly greasy black satin waistcoat, with no cravat, and his whole face seemed smeared with oil like an iron lock. At the counter stood a boy of about fourteen, and there was another boy somewhat younger who handed whatever was wanted. On the counter lay some sliced cucumber, some pieces of dried black bread, and some fish, chopped up small, all smelling very bad. It was insufferably close, and so heavy with the fumes of spirits that five minutes in such an atmosphere might well make a man drunk.
