Collected Works: Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In this Signet Classic volume can be seen Dostoyevksy’s evolving outlook on man’s fate. The works presented here were written at distinct periods in the author’s life, at decisive moments in his groping for a political philosophy and a religious answer. The characters are representative of the human hearts he probed with such surprising insight. They include a whole range of tormented people—from the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying a human life to the irritating, anxious antihero from Notes from Underground, a man who both craves and despises affection. Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as “an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, and the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul” and Notes from Underground as “an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy.”

Afterword by Andrew R. MacAndrew