Our list of some of the best Dostoevsky books & series in recent years. Get inspired by one or more of the following books.
- Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics) (1994)
- The Brothers Karamazov (2002)
- Demons: A Novel in Three Parts (Vintage Classics) (1995)
- The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (2003)
- Crime and Punishment: Pevear & Volokhonsky Translation (Vintage Classics) (1993)
- Crime and Punishment (2001)
- Crime and Punishment: A New Translation (2019)
- The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Modern Library) (2001)
- Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2012)
- The Grand Inquisitor (2016)
- The Double and The Gambler (Vintage Classics) (2007)
Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics) (1994)
Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.
The Brothers Karamazov (2002)
The Brothers Karamasov 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.
Demons: A Novel in Three Parts (Vintage Classics) (1995)
Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.
The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (2003)
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of is destined to stand with their versions of , and as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.After his great portrayal of a guilty man in , Dostoevsky set out in to portray a man of pure innocence.
Crime and Punishment: Pevear & Volokhonsky Translation (Vintage Classics) (1993)
With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Pevear and Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Dostoevsky’s classic novel that presents a clear insight into this astounding psychological thriller. “The best (translation) currently available”–Washington Post Book World.
Crime and Punishment (2001)
The two years before he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866) had been bad ones for Dostoyevsky. His wife and brother had died; the magazine he and his brother had started, Epoch, collapsed under its load of debt; and he was threatened with debtor’s prison. With an advance that he managed to wangle for an unwritten novel, he fled to Wiesbaden, hoping to win enough at the roulette table to get himself out of debt.
Crime and Punishment: A New Translation (2019)
A celebrated new translation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece reveals the “social problems facing our own society” (Nation).Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and on our modern world.
The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Modern Library) (2001)
This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky’s key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic , an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous , a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature.
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2012)
Joseph Frank’s award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language–and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank’s monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author.
The Grand Inquisitor (2016)
2016 Reprint of 1948 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. “The Grand Inquisitor” is part of an extended dialogue within Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” It is told by Ivan, who questions the possibility of a personal and benevolent God, to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk.
The Double and The Gambler (Vintage Classics) (2007)
The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us the definitive version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strikingly original short novels, The Double and The Gambler.The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare–foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre–in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and…
Best Dostoevsky Books: The Ultimate List
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some dostoevsky books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
The Idiot
Author(s): Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
ID: 1516804, Publisher: Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc., Year: July, 2003, Size: 2 Mb, Format: epub
Irène Némirovsky's Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov
Author(s): Marta Laura Cenedese
ID: 2831399, Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, Year: 2021, Size: 2 Mb, Format: pdf
The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece
Author(s): Kevin Birmingham
ID: 3134864, Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, Year: 2021, Size: 19 Mb, Format: epub
Please note that this booklist is not errorless. Some books are really best-sellers according to Washington Post, others are drafted by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant books you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.