Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is the story of a brutal double murder and its aftermath. The novel is compelling and rewarding, full of meaning and symbolism, and raises profound questions about the individual and society, and the nature of free will. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition is a handsome pocket-sized edition that features gilded edges, a cloth-bound imprinted hardcover binding with dust jacket, and a ribbon marker. Translated by Constance Garnett, with an afterward by Oliver Francis. Measures 4" x 6"; 733 pages. Hardcover

This new translation of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is more faithful to the original writing than any previous one, maintaining its coarse and vivid language. Originally published in 1864, it leads readers into the human heart where the dark secrets and mysterious thoughts of the Underground Man are revealed. This riveting and chilling depiction of the dark side of human consciousness has fascinated readers for generations. Paperback.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russia in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky concieved Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What he emerged with in 1872 was at once his darkest novel until The Brothers Karmazov and his most ferociously funny. For alongside its relentlessly escalating plot of conspiracy and assassination, Demons (which earlier translators eroneously titled The Possessed) is a blistering comedy of ideas run amok.

Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life -- object poverty, incessant gambling, the death of his firstborn child -- Dostoevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, just two years after completing Crime and Punishment. In it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal and murder follow, testing Myshkin's moral feelings as Dostoevsky searches through the wreckage left by human misery to find "man in man."

A fictionalized account of the four years Dostoyevsky spent in a penal colony in Siberia after being found guilty in a plot to assassinate the tsar. The characters he encountered were so violent that it changed his way of looking at human nature. Under such extreme conditions, amazingly, he was resurrected into new life. 320 pages, softcover. Eerdmans.

It takes place in a world of office, lodging-house and seamstress's rooms and consists of an impoverished love affair in letters between a copy clerk and a young girl who lives opposite him. Of the other stories in this volume The Landlady portrays a dreamer hero, housed in dreams of art until he is forced to move from his lodgings.

Netochka Nezanova - "Nameless Nobody" - recounts her formative years in vivid, anguished detail. After her father's death, her mother marries a failed musician, who believes himself to be a neglected genius. On the edge of insanity, he exploits the child, ruins the family and abandons Netochka Nezvanova when her mother dies.