Where to start reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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.