Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russia in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What he emerged with in 1872 was at once his darkest novel until The Brothers Karamazov and his most ferociously funny. For alongside its relentlessly escalating plot of conspiracy and assassination, Demons...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is one of the world's first psychological thrillers. A mesmerizing detective story with an intriguing and multifarious central character, Crime and Punishment hinges on the ethical dilemmas and angst of the student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov who plans and implements the murder of a ruthless pawnbroker. Rodion convinces himself that in killing her he will both solves his financial problems

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The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare-foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre- in which a minor official named Golidkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppleganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling, a compulsion that Dostoevsky-who...