Literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers. Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor...

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking...

Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only translation that counts. They are the only translators who succeed in making Dostoevsky accessible to a 21st century audience, thanks to their ruthless attention to detail at the expense of alterations...

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky’s most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, returns to Russia from a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to collect an...

During a stifling St Petersburg summer, the rich landowner Velchaninov is haunted by the figure of a man he keeps glimpsing in the street. When he receives a surprise visit from him late at night, he realizes he is an old friend, Trusotsky, whose late...

The House of the Dead recounts the story of Alexander Goryanchikov, a gentleman who is sent to a prison colony in Siberia for killing his wife. Largely ignored at first by his fellow inmates due to his noble blood, he gradually settles in and becomes an...

In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting...

Among Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady – the...

Presented as a series of letters between the humble copying clerk Devushkin and a distant relative of his, the young Varenka, Poor People brings to the fore the underclass of St Petersburg, who live at the margins of society in the most appalling...

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor 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...

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Pevear and Volokhonsky...

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied...

'The most magnificent novel ever written' Sigmund FreudThe murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for...

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in...

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction by A.D.P. Briggs. In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave a small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become...

The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, Devils (1871-2), also known as The Possessed, is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray that follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small...

Translated by Constance Garnett with an introduction by Anthony Briggs. Dostoevsky's fascination for mental breakdown and violence (20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this...

Inspired by Dostoevsky's own gambling addiction and written under pressure in order to pay off his creditors and retain his rights to his literary legacy, The Gambler is set in the casino of the fictional German spa town of Roulettenburg and follows the...

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the...

Among Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady – the...