The Dostoevsky Collection

Two men exchange polite letters and swindle each other by degrees. A miser dies in a communal apartment and reveals, in death, the secret his whole life was built to protect. A boy of eleven, writing from a prison cell his author was not sure he would survive, discovers courage and love on a golden summer estate. The dead continue their petty social performances beneath the cemetery ground, conscious and unreformed and thoroughly themselves. A husband hides under a bed. The most dangerous character in Dostoevsky's most political novel confesses, in a chapter suppressed for his lifetime, to something that cannot be forgiven and that he cannot bring himself to feel.The Dostoevsky Collection - Part 2 gathers six works from across nearly three decades of his career - comic, tragic, surreal, devastating - each one a different demonstration of the same underlying commitment: to follow the material wherever it leads, and not to stop when it becomes uncomfortable. From the tightly wound farce of The Wife of Another to the radical formal experiment of Bobok to the moral abyss of The Confession of Stavrogin, these are works by a writer who understood that literature's task is not to offer reassurance but to see clearly, and who never, in any register, allowed himself to do otherwise.Funny, strange, harrowing, and impossible to dismiss.