Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Notes From Underground

• presents itself as excerpt from rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg
• Part 1 focuses on man's desire to distinguish himself from nature. The narrator describes this as his spitefulness. War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose and this is what determines human history. The narrator's desire for pain and paranoia is exemplified in a toothache.
• Part 2 focuses on three incidents: the first, an incident with an officer on Nevsky Prospect, illustrates the narrator's theories on insults and suffering; the second, Zverkov's dinner, relates to vacillation and "inertia"; the third, with the prostitute Liza, is the extension and embodiment of the narrator's theories on reason and advantage and on his view of the nature of man.

Begins:

"I AM A SICK MAN...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious)."

Crime and Punishment

• portrays the haphazardly planned murder of a miserly aged pawnbroker and her younger sister by a destitute St. Petersburg student Raskolnikov, and the emotional, mental and physical consequences

The Brothers Karamazov

• it is the story of a patricide in which all of the murdered man's sons share varying degrees of complicity
• Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei Kazamarov; Pavel Smerdyakov, Agrafena Svetlova, Zosima

Begins:

"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place."