Fyodor Dostoyevsky

While contemplating his life and deeming himself ridiculous, a man on the verge of suicide is interrupted by a young girl begging for his help. In his dark mood, he brushes her away, but when he returns home to commit the act he cannot move past his feelings of guilt over his treatment of the girl.

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" was adapted into a 1990 BBC production entitled The Dream starring Jeremy Irons.

HarperPerennial Classics

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Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact upon Raskolvikoc, a desperate and impoverished student, when he murders a despicable pawnbroker. He transgresses moral law, thinking he ultimately benefits humanity. Crime and Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses on the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil and who cannot escape his own conscience.

Prince Lef Mikolayevitch Muishkin is one of the great characters in Russian literature. Is he a saint or just naïve, an idealist or, as many in General Yepanchin's society feel, an 'idiot'? Certainly, his return to St Petersburg after years in a Swiss clinic has a dramatic effect on the beautiful Aglaya, youngest of the Yepanchin daughters and on the charismatic but wilful Nastasio Phillipovna. As he paints a vivid picture of Russian society, Dostoyevsky...

Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel following life of a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. The unnamed narrator turns to a series of incidents from his earlier life and examines them obsessively through a lens of self-contradictory beliefs. A vivid example of essentially irrational nature of human kind presented here with realism and conviction of Dostoyevsky's prose.

From The Notes

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White Nights is the third major Dostoyevsky short story everyone should read, A Faint Heart and The Christmas Tree & Wedding being the other two. This is a series of Winesburg, Ohio like moments where a woman and man meet accidentally on the First Night; proceed to meet again on the Second and Third, almost fall in love, and at the last minute the former lover of the woman returns to take her away. But, the point is the man had a moment, a glorious

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A man is condemned to ten years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp after murdering his wife. He writes of the effects of confinement and servitude on his life and on his fellow prisoners.

The story of a man who falls in love with a young girl, tries to help her and her family by selling everything he can, leading him into poverty and causing him to believe that happiness can only be achieved with riches.

A story of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love, and irreconcilable relationships that is centered around author Ivan Petrovich, his childhood friend and love interest Natalya, a young orphan girl named Elena, and Prince Alexey. Includes a brief biography of the author.

A faithful translation of the classic written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century follows the narrator's withdrawal from his life as an official to the underground, where he makes passionate and obsessive observations on social utopianism and the irrational nature of humankind.

Presents a collection of Christmas stories by such authors as O. Henry, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Henry Van Dyke.