Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a novel about a single crime: a double murder committed by a poor student for money. It is difficult to find a simpler plot, yet the intellectual and spiritual upheaval the novel causes is indelible. The question the protagonist set out to solve – ‘Am I a trembling creature or have I the […]

Notes from Underground is a philosophical novella told as the rambling, contradictory confession of an unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in voluntary isolation in a miserable room on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. This narrator, often called the “Underground Man,” is a bitter, hyper-conscious, and self-loathing individual. The first part, titled “Underground,” is […]

There once were three brothers — Alyosha, Dmitri, and Ivan. They would have lived happily and easily, but their father, a greedy landowner and voluptuary, refused to divide the inheritance honestly. He also tried to seduce Mitya’s beloved—Grushenka—with money. Peaceful negotiations led to nothing. After a terrible scandal, each family member began to devise his […]

The dissolute nobleman and aging bachelor Aleksey Velchaninov is staying in St. Petersburg when he is suddenly confronted by Pavel Trusotsky, a man he vaguely recognizes. Trusotsky is the newly widowed husband of Natalya, with whom Velchaninov had an intense affair nine years prior. The encounter plunges Velchaninov into a chilling psychological duel. Trusotsky, seemingly […]