The Dostoevsky Collection

A young intellectual becomes enthralled by a landlady and the dark, powerful man who seems to hold her in his sway. A copying clerk goes mad not from sorrow but from an excess of happiness he cannot contain. A drunkard steals a pair of trousers and cannot live with the knowledge. A man at a children's party quietly decides to marry a wealthy little girl when she comes of age. A pawnbroker sits beside his dead wife and tries to explain - to himself, to the empty room, to anyone who will listen - why she opened the window.

These five works span nearly thirty years of Dostoevsky's career, from the experiments of his first years to the technical radicalism of his maturity. They range from Gothic suspense to social satire to the almost unbearable psychological intensity of Krotkaya, in which a man's attempt to understand his wife's suicide becomes the most precise possible portrait of his failure to understand her life. Across all of them, Dostoevsky is doing what only he could do: finding, in the compressed space of the short form, the specific pressure point at which a human being breaks - or fails to break - or breaks in a way they cannot see.

This is Dostoevsky at his most concentrated: five chambers, five experiments, five different answers to the same relentless question about what we are capable of and what we cannot face.