Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The unnamed narrator of the novel, a former government official, has decided to retire from the world and lead a life of inactivity and contemplation. His fiercely bitter, cynical and witty monologue ranges from general observations and philosophical musings to memorable scenes from his own life, including his obsessive plans to exact petty revenge...

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family?s rifts and the shadowy...

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life...

Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive Prince Myshkin ? known as ?the idiot? ? pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General, his wife and his three daughters. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly...

Classic / British English Raskolnikoff, a young student, has been forced to give up his university studies because of lack of money. He withdraws from society and, poor and lonely, he develops a plan to murder a greedy old moneylender. Surely the murder of one worthless old woman would be excused, even approved of, if it made ...

Dostoyevsky's own passion for gambling lays in foundation of this novel. He first gambled at the gaming tables at Wiesbaden and later, when his passion for gambling subsided, he played at Baden-Baden, often beginning by winning a small amount of money and losing far more in the end. Using his future work as collateral with his publisher in...