Poor Folk
My first. A clerk and a seamstress, exchanging letters across a courtyard. I was twenty-four. Belinsky wept. I confess I found this gratifying.
Portfolio
My Works, Such As They Are
I present them to you not with pride — pride is a sin I have catalogued at length elsewhere — but with the honest acknowledgment that they represent, taken together, approximately what I meant to say. Not precisely. Never precisely. But approximately.
The Double
A civil servant encounters his exact double. The double is better at being him than he is. The story was not well received. I maintain it is among my finest work. These two positions are not contradictory.
Notes from the House of the Dead
Four years in Omsk, recounted through a fictional narrator. The fiction was thin. The men were real. I have never written anything more true, and I have never found anything true more difficult to write.
Notes from Underground
The underground man speaks for forty pages without being interrupted. He is spiteful, self-contradictory, and correct about almost everything that matters. I did not agree with him. I understood him completely.
Crime and Punishment
A psychological account of a murder. Or rather: an account of what happens in the mind before, during, and after. The murder itself takes almost no space. People find this puzzling. I do not.
The Gambler
Written in twenty-six days to fulfill a contract while simultaneously writing Crime and Punishment. I hired a stenographer named Anna Grigoryevna to help me. I later married her. The novel is about a man who cannot stop gambling. I was, at the time, such a man.
The Idiot
I wanted to portray a truly beautiful man. I discovered, in the writing, that such a man would be destroyed by society. Prince Myshkin is entirely good and entirely helpless. Perhaps these are the same quality.
Demons
Based on the Nechaev affair — a student revolutionary murdered by his own circle, in the name of the cause. I was writing about nihilism. I did not anticipate that the century to come would require me to write about it at greater length.
A Raw Youth
Arkady Dolgoruky: an illegitimate son, seeking his father, forming himself in public. The least read of my major novels. I believe this is the reader's error, not mine.
The Brothers Karamazov
Three brothers. A murdered father. The question of whether God exists and, if not, whether anything remains. I spent three years on it and died four months after it was completed. I intend this as neither coincidence nor symbol. It was simply the book I had to write, and then I wrote it.