Fyodor Dostoyevsky: 329 books

Instead of memorizing vocabulary words, work your way through an actual well-written novel. Even novices can follow along as each individual English paragraph is paired with the corresponding Russian paragraph. It won't be an easy project, but you'll learn a lot.

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill–humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader,...

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful...

How happy I was last night – how immeasurably, how impossibly happy! That was because for once in your life you had relented so far as to obey my wishes. At about eight o'clock I awoke from sleep (you know, my beloved one, that I always like to sleep for a short hour after my work is done) – I awoke,...

The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society. The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from receptive to an innocent...

Imagine living in an adult world with the emotional patience of a child. Dostoevsky has provided his readers with a first person account of this form of existential existence, with its highs and its lows and its lack of predictability. In particular, this is a story about addiction, a gambling addiction....

Most significant of the Russian novelist's early stories (1846) offers a straight-faced treatment of a hallucinatory theme. Golyadkin senior is a powerless target of persecution by Golyadkin junior, his double in almost every respect. Familiar Dostoyevskan themes of helplessness, victimization, scandal — beautifully handled in this small masterpiece.

Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for a Russian family living in a suite at a German hotel. The patriarch of the family, The General, is indebted to the Frenchman Des Grieux and has mortgaged his property in Russia to pay only a small amount of his debt. Alexei is hopelessly in love with Polina, the General's stepdaughter, and swears an oath of servitude to her.

Can too much love be fatal? You are about to find out in this exquisite psychological drama between the owner of a pawnshop and his wife. The narrator's marriage started out cordially enough, but his miserly and reserved ways are taxing to his young wife. A dearth of communication and disagreements about...

The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Prince Lyov Nikolaevich Myshkin, a young man whose goodness and open-hearted simplicity lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince...

The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose...

The Crocodile is an outstanding piece of satire: It is vicious, dreamlike, scatological, and one of the funniest things that Dostoevsky ever wrote. In this brief work, he reveals his hatred of communism and socialism in an unusually direct caricature. The tongue-in-cheek "true story" follows...

This is one of Dostoevsky’s lesser known novels, which is a shame because it is very good – and a bit easier to get through in comparison to Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. The story is narrated by Vanya, an aspiring author and centres around two main storylines. On one side you have...

"Notes from the Underground" is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.