A review by glendonrfrank
The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4.0
"You see, you talk as if you were reading from a book..."
Anyone complaining that Dostoyevsky needs an editor is wrong and is kind of missing the entire thing that makes him Dostoyevsky. My first encounter with him was over three years ago now - which feels a lot longer than it sounds - with Notes From Underground. I was immediately taken by the way he depicts life; the underground man feels truly human in a way few capture. He is bumbling, awkward, self-contradictory, wrapped in anxiety, often despicable but also more comedic than I remembered. It's this trueness with how he depicts humanity that has kept me coming back to him. Sure, he writes in the same manner that the underground man and the narrator of White Nights read: his characters feel truly novelistic, filled with old stories and fleshed-out world views, but I would want it no other way. Dostoyevsky understands that the artifice allows for a deeper, truer exploration of what it means to be human.
This collection shows that in spades, painting a wide variety of protagonists with various relationships to their own humanity. A Gentle Creature stands out for the darkly macabre way its narrator misreads his entire situation, reading almost as an expansion of Browning's "My Last Duchess." These stories also show well how Dostoyevsky gets his inspiration; many of these stories are taken from a single image, a single show of pathos that grabbed his inspiration and prompted an entire narrative to be written around them. Which, of course, builds towards the Dream of a Ridiculous Man (which takes place on my birthday!). While Dostoyevsky's novels are usually painstakingly present, the Dream functions all at once as a prophetic vision for what humanity could be, what it is, and what we must not let it become. Here, the bleeding heart of Dostoyevsky's worlds is painted plainly, that even in the soul-crushing despair of humanity, he sees love, beauty, and the potential for mercy.
Anyone complaining that Dostoyevsky needs an editor is wrong and is kind of missing the entire thing that makes him Dostoyevsky. My first encounter with him was over three years ago now - which feels a lot longer than it sounds - with Notes From Underground. I was immediately taken by the way he depicts life; the underground man feels truly human in a way few capture. He is bumbling, awkward, self-contradictory, wrapped in anxiety, often despicable but also more comedic than I remembered. It's this trueness with how he depicts humanity that has kept me coming back to him. Sure, he writes in the same manner that the underground man and the narrator of White Nights read: his characters feel truly novelistic, filled with old stories and fleshed-out world views, but I would want it no other way. Dostoyevsky understands that the artifice allows for a deeper, truer exploration of what it means to be human.
This collection shows that in spades, painting a wide variety of protagonists with various relationships to their own humanity. A Gentle Creature stands out for the darkly macabre way its narrator misreads his entire situation, reading almost as an expansion of Browning's "My Last Duchess." These stories also show well how Dostoyevsky gets his inspiration; many of these stories are taken from a single image, a single show of pathos that grabbed his inspiration and prompted an entire narrative to be written around them. Which, of course, builds towards the Dream of a Ridiculous Man (which takes place on my birthday!). While Dostoyevsky's novels are usually painstakingly present, the Dream functions all at once as a prophetic vision for what humanity could be, what it is, and what we must not let it become. Here, the bleeding heart of Dostoyevsky's worlds is painted plainly, that even in the soul-crushing despair of humanity, he sees love, beauty, and the potential for mercy.