Uncle's Dream And Other Stories: A Weak Heart; White Nights; Uncle's Dream; the Meek Girl (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

McDuff, David; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140445188 ISBN 13: 9780140445183

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1989

Synopsis

Gone is the contained, brooding, dream-prone atmopshere of his earlier stories; instead "Uncle's Dreams" is narrated with firm objectivity, combining satire, social reportage, puppet theatre and farce in its comic send-up of small-town manners and morals.Dostoyevsky's inspiration for "The Meek Girl" came from a newspaper report on the suicide of a seamstress who plunged from a garret window, holding a religious icon in her hands. According to the critic John Jones, it is "one of the most powerful studies of despair in world literature, a banging on closed doors imagined with abosolute fearlessness."

About this title

About the Author:

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His debut, the epistolary novella Poor Folk(1846), made his name. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with the politically subversive 'Petrashevsky circle' and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Omsk, Siberia. From this experience came The House of the Dead (1860-2). In 1860 he began the journal Vremya (Time). Already married, he fell in love with one of his contributors, Appollinaria Suslova, eighteen years his junior, and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. After the death of his first wife, Maria, in 1864, Dostoyevsky completed Notes from Underground and began work towards Crime and Punishment (1866). The major novels of his late period are The Idiot (1868), Demons(1871-2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881.

Synopsis:

This second volume of Dostoyevsky's shorter fiction contains "White Nights", "The Honest Thief", "A Christmas Tree Party and "A Wedding", "A Faint Heart", "The Little Hero", "A Gentle Spirit", "Uncle's Dream", "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "An Unpleasant Predicament".

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0140445188
• ISBN 13: 9780140445183
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304