At the beginning of the novel Myshkin is returning to St. Petersburg from Switzerland, where he has been under medical treatment for epilepsy. On the train home he meets two people who will play a part in his life. The first of this two is Parfyon Rogozhin, a young man of questionable character. The second person is Lebedev, a government official. When Myshkin arrives in St. Petersburg he moves out into society and meets Nastasya Fillipnova, who Rogozhin is obsessed with.
Myshkin is considered an idiot by the St. Petersburg society because he is inarticulate and often stammers when he tries to talk to people. The story opens with the narrator telling the purportedly true tale of his friend Ivan Matveich, who was swallowed alive by a crocodile.
The narrator, Ivan Matveich, and his wife Elena Ivanovna had all gone to the Arcade to see a crocodile that was put on display by a German gentleman. After teasing the crocodile, Ivan Matveich was swallowed alive. He found the inside of the crocodile to be quite elastic and benign, and despite pleas from Elena Ivanovna to cut open the crocodile the German would not cooperate.
Ivan Matveich urged his friend to arrange for the crocodile to be paid for before it was cut open, but the crocodile was so expensive that an agreement could not be reached. Elena Ivanovna eventually divorced Ivan Matveich, and he carried on his work as a civil servant as best he could from inside the crocodile. It touches upon terrorism and nihilism.
A group of extremists want to overthrow the powers of Russia and rule the country themselves. One of their goals is to eliminate the power of the Russian Orthodox Church. The extremists are bright, secretive, and focused, but in the end, they do not achieve their goals. The story centers around two families: the Verkhovenskys and the Stravrogins. Ivan and Alyosha are brothers; Ivan questions the possibility of a personal, benevolent God and Alyosha is a novice monk.
The Grand Inquisitor is an important part of the novel and one of the best-known passages in modern literature because of its ideas about human nature and freedom, and because of its fundamental ambiguity. The Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man who is a retired civil servant living in St.
The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. First published in , it was lauded by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky as being socially conscious literature, who among others hailed him as the new Gogol.
This book was partly inspired by Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat, whose male protagonist is also a copy clerk. This novel is written in the form of letters of correspondence between the two main characters. Like "The Overcoat", the novel gives a profound account of the lives of low income Russians in the mid-nineteenth century.
The protagonist is former student Romion Romanovich Raskolnikov a down-and-out and somewhat unbalanced individual who lives in a tiny garret at the top of a St. Petersburg apartment building. He is contemplating a crime to prove to himself that all human beings are capable of committing crimes of the most heinous sort. Events lead up to his murdering a pawnbroker named Alyona Ivanovna who he believes the world will be better off without.
He believes the immorality of her death will be offset by the good he can do with the proceeds of his crime.
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Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Usage Public Domain Mark 1. Translated by Constance Garnett. Read in English by Greg Giordano and sid. This is the story of a mild-mannered civil servant, Mr. Golyadkin, who begins to see his "doppelganger" appearing in his life at work, in society, etc.
This "double" has all the qualities that the protagonist lacks. His "double" bullies and persecutes him, slowly taking his place in the world.
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