Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact upon Raskolvikoc, a desperate and impoverished student, when he murders a despicable pawnbroker. He transgresses moral law, thinking he ultimately benefits humanity. Crime and Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses on the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil and who cannot escape his own conscience.

Prince Myshkin finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections, resulting in extortion, scandal, and murder.

A faithful translation of the classic written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century follows the narrator's withdrawal from his life as an official to the underground, where he makes passionate and obsessive observations on social utopianism and the irrational nature of humankind.

"In this almost documentary account of his own experience of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor, the degradation, in relentless detail ..."--(from cover).

Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel following life of a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. The unnamed narrator turns to a series of incidents from his earlier life and examines them obsessively through a lens of self-contradictory beliefs. A vivid example of essentially irrational nature of human kind presented here with realism and conviction of Dostoyevsky's prose.

From The Notes

When . .

...

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence...

Based on Dostoyevsky's fable of a holy fool, this story which takes place in Hokkaido in the winter is about a man who returns home after a stay in an asylum. He is being drawn toward Christianity; his antagonist is an anarchist.