Fyodor Dostoevsky

This book is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the "wicked and sentimental" Fydor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons - the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Rusian life, its social and spiritual strivings, in what was both the golden age and a tragic point in Russian culture. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Introduction by Richard Pevear. 796 pages, softcover.

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."

The Eternal Husband and Other Stories brings together five of Dostoevsky's short masterpieces rendered into English by two of the most celebrated Dostoevsky translators of our time. Filled with many of the themes and concerns central to his great novels, these short works display the full range of his genius. The centerpiece of the collection, the short novel The Eternal Husband, describes the almost surreal meeting of a cuckolded widower and his dead wife's lover. Dostoevsky's dark brilliance and satiric vision infuse the other four tales with all-to-human characters.

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.

Dostoyevsky's narrator has been summoned to his unlce Colonel Rostanov's remote country estate in the hope that he will act as decoy and rescue Rostanev's former ward, Nastenka Yezhevikin, from the tyranny of Opiskin, a despot and charlatan who has the whole household under his thumb.

The Gambler is a psychologically probing novel concerning the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexis Ivanovitch, a young gambling addict; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers; and other characters. Narrated by Alexis, this short novel is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's own experiences as a compulsive gambler.

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.