The Idiot

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin. Returning to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and nave epileptic Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. Here he sees a picture of Nastasya Fillipovna and falls in love with her. Things get complicated when he proposes her and she rejects him for a man of dubious character called Rogozhin. Myshkin finds love in Aglaya but all hell loose breaks when once again Nastasya decides that she is still in love with the Prince. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, the author portrays the purity of a truly beautiful soul and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world. A tragicomic masterpiece.

The Insulted and the Injured

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

The book contains several topics: the relationship between a man and a woman before marriage, the betrayal of loved ones and their forgiveness, fathers and children. As the life stories of two women are almost the same, as Ivan tried to prevent the same end for Natasha. The breaking lives of good people because of unclean ones on hand.

The Permanent Husband

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Decades later after Uncles Dream, Dostoevsky wrote The Permanent Husband, also known as The Eternal Husband (1890). It is one of Dostoevskys most perfect works. Classical in form, it presents his most profound exploration of mimetic rivalry and the duality of human consciousness. A love-affair drama that is both tragedy and comedy, that follows complicated relationships, remarriages, and unrequited love. Told from the point of view of a rich and idle man who is confronted by a younger rival, the husband of his former, and now deceased, mistress, the story portrays the interchanging hatred and love of the two men. Some critics have ranked this novella among Dostoyevskys best works because of its style and structure. Alfred Bem has called it one of the most complete works by Dostoyevsky in regards to its composition and development.

The Possessed. Or, The Devils

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

The Possessed (also known in English as The Devils and The Demons) is the greatest novel ever written about the politics of revolution. It is a social and political satire, a psychological drama, and large scale tragedy. Published in 1871, Fyodor Dostoevskys novel foretold with uncanny prescience events that would occur almost fifty years later during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist tyranny that followed. Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a novel-pamphlet in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. The novels relevance, however, is not limited to Russia and its revolution. With its cast of idealistic murderers and suicides, seductive madmen and glamorous fanatics, The Possessed is a novel for our time as well.

The Raw Youth

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

The protagonist in the novel is a young man of 19, Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate son of the landowner Versilov and the peasant woman Sophia. From childhood, he almost did not see his parents. He was sent to a special institution for rich children, where he was always humiliated and called, a footman. And after graduating from school he receives a letter from his father, in which he calls Arkady to St. Petersburg, where the main events of the novel take place with him.

Uncles Dream

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Uncles Dream is a somewhat comic small-town society tale. It satirizes Petersburg society with an emphasis on the evils of gossip. When the aging Russian Prince, Prince K., arrives in the town of Mordasov, Marya Alexandrovna Moskaleva, a doyenne of local society life, takes him under her protection, with the aim of engineering his marriage with her 23 year old daughter Zina. Yet with many rivals for the hands of both parties, events are not guaranteed to run smoothly. In this novel, vanity and pride are everyday humans obsessions and the word love loses its meaning in the socially-arranged marriages. It is a must read for any fan of not only Dostoyevsky, but of Russian literature and the goings-on of the Russian upper crust.