Vividly imagining the second coming and capture of Christ during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, this parable recounted in "The Brothers Karamazov" is a profound, nuanced exploration of faith, suffering, human nature and free will. Included here too are Dostoyevsky's powerful and disturbing wri[...]

A dark classic of Russia's silver age, this blackly funny novel recounts a schoolteacher's descent into sadism, arson and murder. Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial school teacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degrada[...]

'I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.' In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Pengui[...]

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St. Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious p[...]

This Casebook is a collection of interpretations of Crime and Punishment. The selection not only reflects earlier work by major critics in the field, but also more recent studies. At the same time the choice of critical approaches has been made on the basis of covering the novel's various aspects: D[...]

Crime and Punishment is the story of a murder committed on principle, of a killer who wishes by his action to set himself outside and above society. A novel of fearful tension, physical, and psychological, it is pervaded by Dostoevsky's sinister evocation of St Petersburg, yet in the life of its gl[...]

Notes from the Underground (1864) is one of the most profound works of nineteenth-century literature. A probing, speculative book, often regarded as a forerunner of the Existentialist movement, it examines the important political and philosophical questions that were current in Russia and Europe at [...]

In this almost documentary account of his own experience of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor, the degradation, in relentless detail - even down to the intricate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removin[...]

Prince Myshkin, a good yet simple man, is out of place in the corrupt world obsessed by wealth, power, and sexual conquest created by Russia's elite ruling class, as he becomes caught in the middle of a violent love triangle with two women who become rivals for his attention. Reprint. 12,500 first p[...]

This second edition is based on a significantly revised translation by Susan McReynolds. It is accompanied by a detailed introduction, a pronunciation and explanation key for the novel's main characters, and greatly revised and expanded explanatory annotations.[...]

Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its p[...]

A classic by a Russian master
Prince Myshkin, the idiot, is an almost comically innocent Christ figure in a land of sinners, one whose faith in beauty contrasts sharply with that of his society's.
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