You can’t keep a good writer down. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, arguably the most chaotic and controversial of the great Russian novelists, is a bestseller again. Word of mouth through BookTok and other social media has won a new audience for his writing that explores all the big questions of love and death, of fitting in and walking away, of families and people who feel themselves to be alone in the world.
Unlike the other major Russian novelists of the 19th century, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, Dostoyevsky was not born into great wealth but a middle-class family. Throughout his life he was short of money, and he wrote quickly – you can feel this nervous energy in his books. He maintained that his relatively humble origins meant that, unlike his contemporaries, he wrote about real people, “the accidental families” of “the insulted and humiliated.” If you’ve ever felt sidelined, strange or solitary, Dostoyevsky is on your side.
Here is our guide to where to begin reading his books.
White Nights (1848)
This is the Dostoyevsky book that’s got everyone talking – and was the bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024. It’s a tale of love and anguish between a man and woman who meet each night on a bridge in St Petersburg – “two souls sharing their stories”. But she is in love with another man, so will it be happiness for them or “a new dose of exquisite, voluptuous poison”? This is a story that speaks to the hopeful lover – as well as the fearful loner – in all of us.
Notes from Underground (1864)
Written in 1846 in a manic rush of nighttime work, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, this book was called “the first twentieth-century novel” by one critic. It bursts open in direct, modern style, like being cornered by some bellyaching stranger you can’t shake off. “I am a sick man… I am an evil man.” The narrator is a respectable civil servant letting out his complaints against the world in secret. If you’ve ever wondered why things have to be as they are, or wanted to challenge our received wisdom, this is the book for you.
Crime and Punishment (1866)
The most accessible of Dostoyevsky’s big novels, this book is set around a ticklish premise: a poverty-stricken radical student, Raskolnikov, murders an elderly woman for what he sees as a higher good. He believes extraordinary people – like him – have a “right to transgress” even if others suffer in the process. The book asks whether society can be changed by a series of good deeds, or only by revolutionary action. Crime and Punishment was Dostoyevsky’s first big success and the publishing sensation of its year: “the only book the addicts of reading talked about,” one Russian critic said. More than 150 years later, it’s a hit again.
It’s fitting that the short novel The Gambler was written at high speed, to comply with a contract after Dostoyevsky gambled away his publisher’s advance. It’s an ambitious work, using the character of an obsessive gambler who puts “all his life juices, energies, violence, boldness” into roulette to look both inward at the character and outward at the world. This collection of stories also includes ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, one of Dostoyevsky’s best and oddest stories, featuring a character who flies through space in his journey to separate the thoughts in his head from the feelings in his heart.
The Idiot (1869)
This was the most personal of Dostoyevsky’s major novels, and the one least recognised in its time. The saintly, naive Prince Myshkin faces a world where his Christian faith and belief in compassion are challenged by the more cynical members of society he associates with. The aspects of the book which question whether material things are more important than spiritual ones remain highly relevant today. The Idiot was a hard book for Dostoyevsky to write: his daughter had died, he was travelling much of the time, and suffering from epilepsy, but the pain comes through in the story of a man who believes “the world will be saved by beauty”.
The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Dostoyevsky’s last and longest novel is his masterpiece: the story of three brothers – Ivan, Dmitri and Alyosha – and their rivalry and search for faith. This is a meaty, ambitious novel, which was nonetheless one of the top 50 bestselling translated fiction books in the UK last year. It’s driven by ideas, and full of the author’s signature elements: the heart battling the head, sickness, despair and turmoil on a personal and social level. But it is also a funny book, in the way that Kafka and Beckett are funny: where laughter is the only response to a mad world, and comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin.