Humiliated and Insulted (Alma Classics) - Softcover

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

4.24

20,423 ratings by Goodreads

9781847492692: Humiliated and Insulted (Alma Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184749269X ISBN 13: 9781847492692

Publisher: Alma Books, 2012

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A new translation of a lesser-known work catches the verve and tumult of the original, which, in concept and execution, affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author

Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is "not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces," and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. Found at the center of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager, and a depraved aristocrat who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right. Includes photographs, a critical apparatus on Dostoevsky's life and works, an appendix on Humiliated and Insulted, anecdotes, critical perspectives, adaptations, and spin-offs.

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About the Author:

Fyodor Dostoevsky's (1821–1881) other noted works include The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from the Underground. Ignat Avsey is an independent scholar, and a freelance translator and lecturer. His other Dostoevsky translations include The Karamazov Brothers and The Village of Stepanchikovo.

Review:

"The real nineteenth-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx." - Albert Camus

"Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!" - Albert Einstein

"The only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn." - Friedrich Nietzsche

". . . This note of personal feeling, this harsh reality of actual experience, undoubtedly gives Humiliated and Insulted something of its strange fervour and terrible passion, yet it has not made it egotistic; we see things from every point of view, and we feel not that action has been trammelled by fact, but that fact itself has become ideal and imaginative." - Oscar Wilde

"The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading." - Virginia Woolf

"Irrespective of its value as a work of art, this novel possesses a deep autobiographical interest also, as the character of Vanya, the poor student who loves Natasha through all her sin and shame, is Dostoevsky’s study of himself." - Oscar Wilde

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