Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Most significant of the Russian novelist's early stories (1846) offers straight-faced treatment of hallucinatory theme. Golyadkin senior is ruthlessly persecuted by Golyadkin junior, his double in almost every respect.

The central idea of The Idiot, according to its author, was "to depict a completely beautiful human being." More prosaically, the novel was intended to shore up Dostoyevsky's professional and financial state. The portrait of Prince Myshkin, a holy fool, was created in desperation amidst the squalid poverty engendered by the Russian writer's compulsive gambling. Dostoyevsky's entire future depended on the success of his next novel, which began as one...

The Double, written in Dostoevsky's youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger-a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly...

A new translation of The Possessed and a new title to go with it. The translators claim it better reflects the spirit of what basically is a novel of ideas, the demons of the title being the Western imports of idealism, socialism, materialism, nihilism, atheism and so on.

Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies...

"A Raw Youth (The Adolescent)" is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1875 novel which tells the story of the life of a 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, who is the illegitimate child of the controversial and womanizing landowner Versilov. The novel focuses primarily on the conflict that arises between Arkady and Versilov, when Arkady rejoins his family in St. Petersburg. Arkady who has been away at boarding school hardly knows his family and when he comes...

The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.

This translation has been made from the Russian text of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition, volumes six and seven (Leningrad, 1973). Quotations from Dostoevsky's letters and notebooks in the foreword are from Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevlky: His life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1997).