Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Name: The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
SKU: DOST
Price: 95 USD
Availability: InStock

US$95

Illustrated by Harry Brockway

Introduced By Joyce Carol Oates

Translated By David Magarshack

Seven of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s greatest works of shorter fiction are presented in this striking new Folio Society collector’s edition, illustrated with Harry Brockway’s wood engravings and introduced by author Joyce Carol Oates.

The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

US$95

Book Details

Presentation Box & BindingQuarter-bound in blocked buckram, with printed cloth sides
Plain slipcase

Dimensions9½ inches x 6¼ inches

FontSet in Ehrhardt with Latin Condensed display

Pages272 pages

AuthorFyodor Dostoyevsky

Illustrated byHarry Brockway

Illustration7 integrated full-page woodcut mono illustrations

Publication Date12/10/2021

Editor's Notes

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dostoyevsky’s birth, The Best Short Stories is the definitive collection of the author’s greatest shorter works in David Magarshack’s celebrated translation. Presented in chronological order (with one exception), the seven entries include essential stories such as ‘Notes from the Underground’ and ‘White Nights’, as well as lesser-known but equally compelling literary treasures like the autobiographical ‘The Honest Thief’. Covering themes of class, good and evil, love, philosophy and religion, each of these stories explores the psyche of the characters and myriad facets of human nature. Harry Brockway demonstrates an intuitive understanding of Dostoyevsky’s writing through his seven exquisite wood engravings which convey the beauty and pathos of each story. His artwork continues to the binding design with two engravings separated by a beautiful gold-blocked buckram spine. The edition includes Magarshack’s original introduction to his translation, while novelist and National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates draws on her vast knowledge of Russian literature in a newly commissioned introduction that is a fascinating appraisal of Dostoyevsky’s work.

About the Illustrator

Harry Brockway

Harry Brockway was born in Newport, South Wales, in 1958. He studied sculpture at Kingston-upon-Thames Art School and at the Royal Academy Schools in London before training to become a stonemason. Since 1989 he has worked as a stone-carver and illustrator. He uses a range of sculpting materials to create his art, including limestone, sandstone, slate, marble and wood. He has been a member of the Society of Wood Engravers since 1984 and has produced a significant body of work for Folio Society publications, including Frankenstein (2004; 2015), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (2010; 2017), Brideshead Revisited (2018) and Maigret (2018).

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About the Illustrator

Harry Brockway

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Harry Brockway

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Harry Brockway

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Harry Brockway

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Harry Brockway

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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.

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