Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
A desperate young man plans the perfect crime—the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law—if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful...

This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and...

"Poor Folk" is Dostoevsky’s first novel, exploring in the form of letters the unhappy and arduous strains of poverty. However, the novel is so much more. The author’s major prowess lies in the depiction of the human condition, a characteristic feature of Russian realism. The emotional struggles and the gruesome chasm that separates the two souls in love, never destined to be together, paints a devastating picture of the harshness of life. Definitely...

Though he is best known for his realist and deep realistic and psychological novels, Dostoevsky’s literary life produced memorable short stories as well. "Polzunkov" is a story that should not be skipped by the author’s fans and the connoisseurs of short story writing in general. It is a tale about a joke that misfired on the protagonist Polzunkov, whose expectations crash down headlong in the end. Another narrative that explores the theme of...

First published in 1846, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella The Double is a classic doppelganger and the second major work published by the author. It is the story of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a government clerk who believes that a fellow clerk has taken over his identity and is determined to bring about his ruin. Considered the most Gogolesque of Dostoyevsky's works, the novella brilliantly depicts Golyadkin's descent into madness in a way that

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