The story is put together in the form of a set of letters written between two people, Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova. Makar and Varvara are second cousins twice-removed and live across from each other on the same street in terrible apartments. Makar's, for example, is merely a portioned-off section of the kitchen, and he lives with several other tenants, such as the Gorshkovs, whose son dies and who groans in agonizing hunger almost the entire story, gently crying at night. Makar and Varvara exchange letters back and forth attesting to their terrible living conditions and the former...

Lauded as "socially responsible literature" by critics all over the world, "Poor Folk" quickly became a landmark book for its portrayal of the human plight. Through a series of letters exchanged between the characters, "Poor Folk" provides a profound account of the lives of low-income Russians during the mid-nineteenth century.

Crime and Punishment (Russian: Преступление и наказание Prestuplenie i nakazanie) is a novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky that was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments. It was later published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels after he returned from his exile in Siberia, and the first great novel of his mature period. Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental...

Notes from the Underground is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet...

This is a dual-language book with the Russian text on the left side, and the English text on the right side of each spread. The texts are precisely synchronized. A great book for learning both languages while reading a Russian classic masterpiece.

The Idiot (1868), written under the appalling personal circumstances Dostoevsky endured while travelling in Europe, not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most powerful indictment of a Russia struggling to emulate contemporary Europe while sinking under the weight of Western materialism. It is the portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society in which a "positively good man" clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his moral idealism. Meticulously faithful to the original, this new translation...

This acclaimed English version of Dostoevsky's last novel does justice to all its levels of artistry and intention, as murder mystery, black comedy, pioneering work of psychological realism, and enduring statement about freedom, sin and suffering.

The Insulted and Injured, originally published in 1861, is Fyodor Dostoevsky's first major work of fiction after his Siberian exile and the first of the long novels for which he is famous. Set in nineteenth-century Petersburg, the novel depicts a group of people suffering from the cruel and selfish machinations of a dark and powerful prince. Can pure love overcome such evil?