Books Written by Fyodor Dostoevsky

By Wikipedia’s count, thirteen novels, three novellas and seventeen short stories, plus a large body of journalism, most of it in A Writer’s Diary. The line between novel and novella is drawn differently by different editors, so you will also see eleven or twelve novels quoted. Thirteen key books are on this page, from Poor Folk (1846) to The Brothers Karamazov (1880), with the rest listed below them.

Poor Folk (1846), The Double (1846), White Nights (1848), Humiliated and Insulted (1861), The House of the Dead (1862), Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Gambler (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Eternal Husband (1870), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Years are those of first complete publication in Russian, usually the end of magazine serialisation.

With Crime and Punishment (1866). It is more tightly plotted and shorter than The Brothers Karamazov, and it is the clearest introduction to his central concerns before the longer novels. If you would rather start small, White Nights (1848) can be read in an evening.

Crime and Punishment (1866) is the most widely read; The Brothers Karamazov (1880), his last novel, is the one most often called his masterpiece. Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever written”.

There is no single standard. Constance Garnett translated nearly all of his fiction between 1912 and 1920 and her versions are still widely reprinted. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky retranslated the major novels from 1990, and their Brothers Karamazov won a PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Other modern translations include David McDuff and Oliver Ready (Crime and Punishment), Robert Maguire (Demons) and Michael R. Katz.

He was arrested in April 1849 as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that discussed banned political and social texts. He was sentenced to death and taken before a firing squad in December 1849, before a letter from the tsar commuted the sentence to four years of hard labour at Omsk in Siberia, followed by military service in exile. The experience shaped nearly all of his later fiction, from The House of the Dead to The Idiot.

Yes. The Russian title is Besy. Constance Garnett published it as The Possessed in 1916; later translators preferred The Devils or Demons, because besy refers to the demons that possess, not to the possessed.

His journalism contains antisemitic passages, especially in A Writer’s Diary, including the essay “The Jewish Question” (1877), and Jewish characters in his fiction are often drawn from negative stereotypes. In an 1877 letter to the critic Arkady Kovner he wrote that he was “not an enemy of the Jews at all”. His biographer Joseph Frank, reviewing David Goldstein’s Dostoyevsky and the Jews, described him as a “guilty anti-Semite” whose prejudice sat alongside a call, at the end of that same essay, for full equality of rights.

Many times. Akira Kurosawa filmed The Idiot (1951); White Nights became Visconti’s Le notti bianche (1957) and Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971); Richard Brooks directed The Brothers Karamazov (1958); and Crime and Punishment has been filmed from 1923 onwards, including by Aki Kaurismäki (1983). On stage, Prokofiev’s The Gambler and Janáček’s From the House of the Dead are operas.

On 9 February 1881 (28 January Old Style) in St Petersburg, aged 59, less than four months after The Brothers Karamazov was completed. He is buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Crime and Punishment was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1865 and 1866. It was serialised in the journal The Russian Messenger in monthly instalments from January to December 1866, and a single-volume edition followed in 1867.

Dostoevsky is pronounced roughly “doss-tuh-YEF-skee”, with the stress on the third syllable. Merriam-Webster also gives “doss-tuh-YEV-skee” as an accepted variant.

Yes. Dostoevsky was a Russian Orthodox Christian, raised in a religious family. In a letter of January 1854 he called himself a “child of unbelief and doubt”, yet wrote that even if someone proved the truth lay outside Christ, he would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, essayist and journalist, regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Russian and world literature. Britannica credits his “psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart” with an immense influence on 20th-century fiction.

Dostoevsky died of natural causes in Saint Petersburg on 9 February 1881, aged 59, after suffering several pulmonary haemorrhages. He had been diagnosed with early-stage pulmonary emphysema in 1879, and he was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

No. Dostoevsky did not die by suicide; he died of lung disease, after several pulmonary haemorrhages, on 9 February 1881.

The Idiot follows Prince Myshkin, who returns to Saint Petersburg after years of treatment for epilepsy in Switzerland and becomes entangled with the tormented Nastasya Filippovna, the obsessive merchant Rogozhin and the proud Aglaya. Dostoevsky intended Myshkin as a portrait of “the positively good and beautiful man”; the novel was serialised from 1868 to 1869.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821 (30 October in the Old Style calendar then used in Russia). He was the second child of a doctor.

Dostoevsky is often described as a philosopher as well as a novelist. His Notes from Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature, and existentialist thinkers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were influenced by him.

In his twenties he was drawn to the utopian socialist ideas of Charles Fourier, and in 1846 he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, the discussion group that led to his arrest in 1849. Later in life he rejected atheistic socialism as a Christian, and in an unfinished article he called socialism “the latest incarnation of the Catholic idea”.

White Nights is a short story, first published in 1848, about a lonely young dreamer in Saint Petersburg who meets a young woman, Nastenka, over four nights and falls in love with her. She is waiting for a lover who promised to return, and when he reappears on the fourth night she leaves with him, leaving the narrator heartbroken.

Dostoevsky is best known for psychological fiction: novels, novellas and short stories. He also wrote journalism, essays, literary criticism and memoir, and his works explore themes such as suicide, poverty, human manipulation and morality.

Readers return to Dostoevsky for his psychological depth and for the way he tackles the big questions of faith, morality, love and death. Writers from Nietzsche to Kafka admired him, and his books have been translated into more than 170 languages.

Yes. Dostoevsky was the second of nine children; his siblings were Mikhail, Varvara, Andrei, Lyubov, Vera, Nikolai, Aleksandra and Yelizaveta. Lyubov and Yelizaveta died as infants.