Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, i...more

"Notes from Underground" (1864) is a study of a single character, 'the real man of the Russian majority', and a revelation of Dostoyevsky's own deepest beliefs. One of his best critics has said of the first part that it forms his 'most utterly nakedpages. Never afterwards was he so fully and openly to reveal the inmost recesses, unmeant for display...more

The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, Devils (1871-2), also known as The Possessed, is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray that follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. This new translation includes the chapter "Stavrogin's confession," initially ce...more

Gripping new translations of two harrowing psychological novels by the Russian master The two novels of inner turmoil brought together here mark a turning point for Dostoyevsky, and are among his most personally revealing. The anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground (1864) tells of his refusal to become a worker in the "ant-hill" of society an...more