The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 and was orphaned while still in his teens. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was well received by literary critics, but the author’s initial success was short lived. In 1849 he was arrested because of his involvement with a group of utopian socialists and sentenced to death; this was commuted at the last moment. Thereafter he was subjected to years of penal servitude and exile. The experience radically altered his political opinions. Later he travelled around Europe, where he became addicted to gambling and grew more convinced in his anti-European views. He is best known today for his novels published in the 1860s and 1870s – Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov.
Throughout his lifetime, Dostoyevsky was acclaimed as a leading figure of Russian literature’s golden age, most notably after a prophetic speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow in 1880. His complex political and philosophical views – as a Christian who sometimes criticised Orthodoxy, and a utopian socialist who was also deeply conservative and a committed Russian nationalist – are often explored in his fiction through close psychological examination of troubled, delusional and criminal characters. Dostoyevsky died at home in 1881, quoting from the Bible in his final moments. Thirty thousand people attended his funeral.
Joyce Carol Oates’ first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964 when she was still in her twenties. Since then, she has published a further 57 novels as well as many books of short stories, poems, plays and nonfiction. Oates read widely in 19th-century fiction as a girl – and has cited Dostoyevsky as an early influence – before encountering classic works of modernism as a student at Syracuse University, all of which helped to shape her own writing. Her best-received fictions include the Wonderland Quartet (1967–71) – the third volume, Them, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970 – and Blonde (2000), a fictional treatment of the life of Marilyn Monroe, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Oates taught writing at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014. Together with her first husband she founded and edited a literary magazine, the Ontario Review, and an associated publishing house. In 2010 she was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Oates wrote a new introduction for The Folio Society edition of The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 2021.