Fedor Dostoevskij

Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a respected civil servant. Dostoevsky introduces him in his tidy and modest dwelling on a morning brimming with expectations for our "hero": > the dingy, smoke-grimed greenish walls of his little room, the mahogany chest of drawers, the Turkish-style divan of red oilcloth with greenish little flowers, looked upon him with familiarity. In front of the mirror, on thi

In the preamble, the author himself divides the tale into two parts. In the first, entitled "Underground", > the character presents himself, his views, and seems to wish to elucidate the reasons why he appeared, and was bound to appear, in our midst, that is, how in the era of positivism and dominant reason, it was necessary to acknowledge a primordial force within man—one rising from the unde

> I am a Dreamer... I have so little real life! In reality, I have lived moments such as these so rarely that I hope to make them live again in my dreams. I will dream of you all night, every week, every month, all year round.... This is how the first-person narrator expresses himself when, one night, he meets a weeping girl who also describes herself as a "dreamer." We will never learn his name;

The first-person narrator is a young man living in Petersburg > with nothing to do, (...) convinced that in short order (he would) accomplish truly remarkable, even grandiose things. He is supported by an uncle, a wealthy landowner in distant Stepanchikovo. Their correspondence is sparse, but of late the young man has been urged to join his uncle through rambling, incoherent letters, beneath w

Arkady Dolgoruky, the first-person narrator, is the natural son of Versilov, > a cold and proud man, haughty and negligent toward me, who..., having fathered me and abandoned me among strangers, not only did not know me at all, but never even repented of it . Arkady suffers deeply from his father’s indifference, not least because the latter has taken his mother with him and reduced the young m

The novel pivots on the figure of Prince Myshkin, who returns to Russia after an extended stay in Switzerland, where he was treated for "idiocy"—that is, mental illness. The protagonist’s trajectory unfolds within a setting crowded with characters, from the somber Rogozhin (virtually the personification of evil) to a succession of opportunists and nihilists, through to two female characters (Nast