Dostoyevsky was the son of an impoverished nobleman of Lithuanian origin. born in 1821 in Moscow, where his father held the post of resident doctor at a charity hospital. The family had small living quarters on the hospital grounds, and Fyodor became acquainted at an early age with misery, misfortune and death. Doctor Dostoyevsky, authoritarian and morose, believed in old fashioned discipline and strict religious upbringing, and Fyodor's childhood...

"The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the "wicked and sentimental" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons--the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual...

A poverty-stricken Russian girl tries to survive, which depends on the largesse of others.

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent" "(first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a na-ve 19-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...

In this literary classic, Fyodor Dostoevsky focuses on a nobleman whose gentle, childlike nature has earned him the nickname "the idiot," and presents a superb, panoramic view of mid-nineteenth-century Russian manners, morals, and philosophy

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.

Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in Tsarist St. Petersburg, murders a despicable pawnbroker and this act sets his torture in motion.