Fyodor Dostoevsky

Presents a collection of short stories by the Russian author, including "White Nights," "The Peasant Marey," and "A Gentle Creature."

The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky

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On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss, with tears streaming down my cheeks, the one and only earth I have left behind. I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!…

I had stopped thinking about anything at that time: it made no difference to me. Not that I had found an answer to all the questions. Oh, I had not settled a single question, and there were thousands of them! But it made no difference to me, and all the questions disappeared.

I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.

Writing that speaks from both sides of the coin is rare, or at least rarely done with the kind of sincerity that invites reflection rather than instruction. Often, stories are laid out plainly, asking you to take them as they are. But in these short stories, Dostoevsky centers the anti-hero (figures steeped in vileness and vanity), yet he does not cast them aside. Instead, he gives them space, complexity, and most importantly, contradiction. Through these conflicted voices, he offers a lens that urges us to see things from multiple angles: how goodness and corruption can coexist, how truth is never singular, and how every reader must arrive at their own conclusion. Dostoevsky never spoon-feeds us; he trusts in our ability to wrestle with the ambiguity. It’s not nihilism that he offers, but rather the raw materials of life itself—the anguish, the tension, the flickers of grace. And maybe that’s the point: you have to walk through despair to recognize a blessing when it arrives. That’s what makes his work so enduringly meaningful.

The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky

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