The Grand Inquisitor / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Title: The Grand Inquisitor 

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Translator: H. P. Blavatsky 

Subjects: Classic; Fiction

The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky's celebrated novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the last publication from the pen of the great Russian novelist, who died a few months ago, just as the concluding chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. One of the three brothers of the story, Ivan, a rank materialist and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to throw this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes to Alyosha—the youngest of the brothers, a young Christian mystic brought up by a "saint" in a monastery—as follows: (—Ed. Theosophist, Nov., 1881)]

The Devils / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Title: The Devils (The Possessed)  

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Translator: Constance Garnett

Subjects: Classic; Fiction; Nihilism

It is a social and political satire, a psychological drama, and large scale tragedy. According to Ronald Hingley, it is Dostoevsky's "greatest onslaught on Nihilism", and "one of humanity's most impressive achievements." One of the great classic from Dostoevsky. Even it is not in my must read list but you can't ignore it. 

Notes from the Underground / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Title: Notes from the Underground 

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Subjects: Classic; Fiction; Political

Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow" and describes certain events that appear to be destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.

The Brothers Karamazov / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Title: The Brothers Karamazov 

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Translation: Constance Garrett

Subjects: Classic; Fiction; Philosophical; Psychological 

The book has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature. It enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia, with a plot which revolves around the subject of patricide. Must read  for all. 

The Idiot / Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Title: The Idiot 

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

Translator: Eva Martin

Subjects: Fiction; Classic; Psychological

The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the people. In it, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into society more concerned with wealth, power and sexual conquest rather than ideals. He soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle.

Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Title: Crime and Punishment 

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translation: Constance Garnett

Subjects: Classic; Fiction 

The book is written with great understanding of human psychology. The story is about mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov. He planed to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. He thought, he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds.

Mr. Prohartchin / Fyodor Dostoevsky

In the darkest and humblest corner of Ustinya Fyodorovna's flat lived Semyon Ivanovitch Prohartchin, a well-meaning elderly man, who did not drink. Since Mr. Prohartchin was of a very humble grade in the service, and received a salary strictly proportionate to his official capacity, Ustinya Fyodorovna could not get more than five roubles a month from him for his lodging. Some people said that she had her own reasons for accepting him as a lodger; but, be that as it may, as though in despite of all his detractors, Mr. Prohartchin actually became her favourite, in an honourable and virtuous sense, of course.

A Little Hero / Fyodor Dostoevsky

At that time I was nearly eleven, I had been sent in July to spend the holiday in a village near Moscow with a relation of mine called T., whose house was full of guests, fifty, or perhaps more.... I don't remember, I didn't count. The house was full of noise and gaiety. It seemed as though it were a continual holiday, which would never end. It seemed as though our host had taken a vow to squander all his vast fortune as rapidly as possible, and he did indeed succeed, not long ago, in justifying this surmise, that is, in making a clean sweep of it all to the last stick.

Polzunkov / Fyodor Dostoevsky

I began to scrutinize the man closely. Even in his exterior there was something so peculiar that it compelled one, however far away one's thoughts might be, to fix one's eyes upon him and go off into the most irrepressible roar of laughter. That is what happened to me. I must observe that the little man's eyes were so mobile, or perhaps he was so sensitive to the magnetism of every eye fixed upon him, that he almost by instinct guessed that he was being observed, turned at once to the observer and anxiously analysed his expression.

A Faint Heart / Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Story

Under the same roof in the same flat on the same fourth storey lived two young men, colleagues in the service, Arkady Ivanovitch Nefedevitch and Vasya Shumkov.... The author of course, feels the necessity of explaining to the reader why one is given his full title, while the other's name is abbreviated, if only that such a mode of expression may not be regarded as unseemly and rather familiar. But, to do so, it would first be necessary to explain and describe the rank and years and calling and duty in the service, and even, indeed, the characters of the persons concerned; and since there are so many writers who begin in that way, the author of the proposed story, solely in order to be unlike them (that is, some people will perhaps say, entirely on account of his boundless vanity), decides to begin straightaway with action. Having completed this introduction, he begins.

The Little Orphan / Fyodor Dostoevsky

I

In a large city, on Christmas eve in the biting cold, I see a young child, still quite young, six years old, perhaps even less; yet too young to be sent on the street begging, but assuredly destined to be sent in a year or two.

This child awakes one morning in a damp and frosty cellar. He is wrapped in a kind of squalid dressing-gown and is shivering. His breath issues from between his lips in white vapor; he is seated on a trunk; to pass the time he blows the breath from his mouth, and amuses himself in seeing it escape. But he is very hungry. Several times since morning he has drawn near the bed covered with a straw mattress as thin as gauze, where his mother lies sick, her head resting on a bundle of rags instead of a pillow.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chapter I

I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me - and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter--not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.

The Crocodile / Fyodor Dostoevsky

A true story of how a gentleman of a certain age and of respectable appearance was swallowed alive by the crocodile in the Arcade, and of the consequences that followed.

Oh Lambert! Ou est Lambert?

As-tu vu Lambert?

Chapter I

On the thirteenth of January of this present year, 1865, at half-past twelve in the day, Elena Ivanovna, the wife of my cultured friend Ivan Matveitch, who is a colleague in the same department, and may be said to be a distant relation of mine, too, expressed the desire to see the crocodile now on view at a fixed charge in the Arcade. As Ivan Matveitch had already in his pocket his ticket for a tour abroad (not so much for the sake of his health as for the improvement of his mind), and was consequently free from his official duties and had nothing whatever to do that morning, he offered no objection to his wife's irresistible fancy, but was positively aflame with curiosity himself.

Bobok / Fyodor Dostoevsky

SEMYON ARDALYONOVITCH said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday: "Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivanovitch? Tell me that, pray."

A strange requirement. I did not resent it, I am a timid man; but here they have actually made me out mad. An artist painted my portrait as it happened: "After all, you are a literary man," he said. I submitted, he exhibited it. I read: "Go and look at that morbid face suggesting insanity."

White Nights / Fyodor Dostoevsky

A sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer

FIRST NIGHT

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, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!... Speaking of capricious and ill-humoured people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances?

The Grand Inquisitor / Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction," laughed Ivan. "Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age--as you must have been told at school--when it was the great fashion among poets to make the denizens and powers of higher worlds descend on earth and mix freely with mortals... In France all the notaries' clerks, and the monks in the cloisters as well, used to give grand performances, dramatic plays in which long scenes were enacted by the Madonna, the angels, the saints, Christ, and even by God Himself.

The Christmas Tree and the Wedding / Fyodor Dostoevsky

The other day I saw a wedding... But no! I would rather tell you about

a Christmas tree. The wedding was superb. I liked it immensely. But

the other incident was still finer. I don't know why it is that the

sight of the wedding reminded me of the Christmas tree. This is the

way it happened:

Exactly five years ago, on New Year's Eve, I was invited to a

children's ball by a man high up in the business world, who had his

connections, his circle of acquaintances, and his intrigues. So it

seemed as though the children's ball was merely a pretext for the

parents to come together and discuss matters of interest to

themselves, quite innocently and casually.