One of the greatest works of fiction ever written, Crime and Punishment is at once an intense psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, and a fascinating detective thriller instilled with philosophical, religious, and social commentary.

Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact upon a desperate and impoverished student when he murders a despicable pawnbroker, transgressing moral law to ultimately “benefit humanity.” After killing the old woman, haunted by guilt and terror, the young man must decide whether to assuage his conscience by confessing or attempt to get away with the perfect crime.

Crime and Punishment takes the listener on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil who cannot escape his own conscience.

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime-the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old woman 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 psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, and a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious, and social commentary. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness, and terror.
Crime and Punishment takes the listener on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil-a man who cannot escape his own conscience.

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation–certain to become the definitive version–of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

Sentenced to death for advocating socialism in 1849, Dostoevsky served a commuted sentence of four years of hard labor. The account he wrote afterward (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom and hope but also of the feuds and betrayals, the moments of comedy, and the acts of kindness he observed.

As a nobleman and a political prisoner, Dostoevsky was despised by most of his fellow convicts, and his first-person narrator–a nobleman who has killed his wife–experiences a similar struggle to adapt. He also undergoes a transformation over the course of his ordeal, as he discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. Notes from a Dead House reveals the prison as a tragedy both for the inmates and for Russia. It endures as a monumental meditation on freedom.

A predecessor to such monumental works as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground represents a turning point in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing toward the more political side. In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives, withdraws from that society into the underground. This “Underground Man” is one of the first genuine antiheroes in European literature.
The first part of this unusual work is often treated as a philosophical text in its own right; the second part illustrates the theory of the first by means of its own fictional practice. A dark and politically charged novel, Notes from the Underground shows Dostoevsky at his best.
This version of Notes from the Underground is the translation by Constance Garnett.

A predecessor to such monumental works such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From Underground represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky’s writing towards the more political side. In this work we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives withdraws from that society into the underground. A dark and politically charged novel, “Notes From Underground” shows Dostoyevsky at his best.a

“I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man,” a nameless voice cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the painful self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn of a lonely individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature.

In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels–Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov–Fyodor Dostoevsky penned the darkly fascinating Notes from Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes–moral, religious, political, and social–that dominated Dostoevsky’s later works.

Those who are familiar with his works will immediately recognize the novel’s richly complex philosophical, political, and psychological themes; those who are not will find the best introduction to Dostoevsky’s grander masterpieces.

Both a masterpiece of Russian populist writing and a parody of the entire genre, Poor People is an early example of Dostoevsky’s genius.

Written as a series of letters, Poor People is the tragic tale of a petty clerk and his impossible love for a young girl. Longing to help her and her family, he sells everything he can, but his kindness leads him only into more desperate poverty, and ultimately into debauchery. As a typical “man of the underground,” he serves as the embodiment of the belief that happiness can only be achieved with riches.

This work is remarkable for its vivid characterizations, especially of Dievushkin, the clerk, solely by means of his letters to the young girl and her answers to him.

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive nineteen-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky’s translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy.

After spending four years in a Siberian penal settlement, during which time he underwent a religious conversion, Dostoevsky developed a keen ability for deep character analysis. In The Brothers Karamazov, he explores human nature at its most loathsome and cruel but never flinches at what he finds.

The Brothers Karamazov tells the stirring tale of four brothers: the pleasure-seeking, impatient Dmitri; the brilliant and morose Ivan; the gentle, loving, and honest Alyosha; and the illegitimate Smerdyakov: shy, silent, and cruel. The four unite in the murder of one of literature’s most despicable characters—their father. While on the surface a story about patricide, this novel is, on a deeper level, a spiritual tale of the struggle between faith, doubt, reason, and free will.

This passionate novel of ethics and morality, religion and philosophy, was Dostoevsky’s final and best work.

This is the story of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin.

Mr. Golyadkin, a minor government official, is a rather middling man. Then one day he meets his “double”–a man with the same name, face, and background. Initially charmed by the coincidence, Golyadkin soon notices a discernable cooling in the reaction of his friends and colleagues, while his double seems to grow in popularity. Mr. Golyadkin, unable to escape the relentless presence of “Golyadkin junior,” finds that even the most ordinary activities begin to take on a terrifying significance, until he finds himself on the verge of a breakdown.

The Double introduced the concept of the split personality or divided soul that would become a common psychological feature of the characters of Dostoevsky’s later novels. Considered the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky’s works, the novella brilliantly depicts Golyadkin’s descent into madness in a way that is hauntingly poetic. The Double illustrates Dostoevsky’s uncanny ability to capture the complexity of human emotion especially the darker side of the human psyche. In this remarkable work of doppelganger literature, Dostoevsky examines the neurosis and paranoia that cripple a seemingly ordinary man, producing a thoroughly modern nightmare, brilliantly foreshadowing the works of Kafka and Sartre.

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 is hauntingly poetic. The Double illustrates Dostoyevsky’s uncanny ability at capturing the complexity of human emotion, especially the darker side of the human psyche.

The Double, written in Dostoevsky’s youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger-a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work.
The Gambler was written twenty years later, under the pressure of crushing debt. It is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man’s exhilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky-who once gambled away his young wife’s wedding ring-knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of his character, Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.
The two strikingly original short novels brought together here-in new translations by award-winning translators-were both literary gambles of a sort for Dostoevsky.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Engaging with a variety of philosophical and religious themes, the works of Dostoevsky explore human psychology in the turbulent political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of nineteenth century Russia. and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. The 1877 short story ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, examines the experiences of a man who decides that life is worthless. Having fallen into nihilism and despair, he is determined to end his life. To that end, he has acquired a pistol. However, an encounter with a distressed young girl interferes with his plans. Back home he eventually falls asleep, into a long lucid dream …

The Gambler is a psychologically probing novel concerning the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexis Ivanovitch, a young gambling addict; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers; and other characters. Narrated by Alexis, this short novel is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s own experiences as a compulsive gambler. Like so many characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, Alexis is trying to break through the wall of the established order and the human condition itself, but instead he is drawn into the vortex of the roulette wheel.
This version of The Gambler is the translation by C. J. Hogarth.

The Gambler is the short novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky tells the story of a young tutor named Alexey Ivanovitch, who works in the household of an imperious Russian general. He wants to break through the wall of the established order in Russia. To reach this goal, he tries to achieve money and power by gambling. He descends further and further into a life of roulettes and casino living and sinks himself in the endless downward spiral of betting and loss. As he fails to resist the temptations of his addiction (the gambling), he finds himself engaged in unrequited love with Polina, the General’s cruel yet seductive niece.
This version of the book is translated by Soroosh Habibi into Persian (Farsi) and Narrated by Babak Ghahremani. The Persian version of The Gambler’s audiobook is published by Maktub worldwide.

Art imitates life in this brilliant psychological study of a compulsive gambler, modeled on Dostoevsky’s own tendencies. Like so many characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, Alexei, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general, is trying to break through the wall of the established order and the human condition itself, but instead he is drawn into the vortex of the roulette wheel. His intense addiction is accentuated by his affair with the general’s cruel, seductive niece.

With unforgettable characterizations, this novel explores the emotional roller coaster, changing fortunes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of the fashionable German gambling set. It is also a stunning psychological portrait.

Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, which explored the mind of a murderer, Fyodor Dostoevsky produced another masterpiece: The Idiot. This time the author portrays a truly beautiful soul and one of Dostoevsky’s greatest characters-Prince Muishkin, a saintly, Christ-like, yet deeply human figure.
The story begins when Muishkin arrives on Russian soil after a stay in a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by St. Petersburg society as an idiot for his generosity and innocence, the prince finds himself at the center of a struggle between a rich, kept woman and a beautiful, virtuous girl, who both hope to win his affection. Unfortunately, Muishkin’s very goodness seems to bring disaster to everyone he meets. The shocking denouement tragically reveals how, in a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, a sanatorium is the only place for a saint.
This version of The Idiot is the translation by Eva Martin.

In The Idiot, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon 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. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing the wreckage left by human misery to find “man in man.”

The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. “They call me a psychologist,” wrote Dostoevsky. “That is not true. I’m only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.”

Loosely based on sensational press reports of a Moscow student’s murder by fellow revolutionists, The Possessed depicts the destructive chaos caused by outside agitators who move into a provincial town. The enigmatic and ideological Stavrogin dominates the novel, his magnetic personality influencing his tutor, the liberal intellectual poseur Stepan Verhovensky, and the teacher’s revolutionary son Pyotr, as well as other radicals. Stavrogin is portrayed as a man of strength without direction, capable of goodness and nobility. When he loses his faith in God, however, he is seized by brutal desires he does not fully understand.

Widely considered the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed showcases Dostoevsky’s brilliant characterization, amazing insight into the human heart, and crushing criticism of the desire to manipulate the thought and behavior of others.

White Nights is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, published in 1848, early in the writer’s career. The story tells about unfortunate young man who is lonely and shy. He strolls the streets of 1840s Saint Petersburg contemplating his solitude when he happens upon a young woman in tears.
While escorting her home, the two have a conversation and soon become friends. The young man has never had a romantic connection with a woman until he meets her. In that short time span, he discovers emotions that he has never felt.
This relationship lasts four nights and Fyodor Dostoyevsky tries to ask: Is temporary love possible? Also he explores the complex dynamics between people and the pain of the human condition.