This is the eleventh volume in Mrs Garnett’s translation of the works of Dostoevsky. It contains ten stories: An honest thief; Uncle’s dream; A novel in nine letters; An unpleasant predicament; Another man’s wife; The heavenly Christmas tree; The peasant Marev; The crocodile; Bobok; The dream of a ridiculous man.
“Perhaps Dostoevsky more than any other writer sets up this mysterious relationship with the reader, this sense of sharing. While we read, we are like children to whom one tells a tale: we seem in some strange way to half-know what is coming and yet we do not know; to have heard it all before, and yet our amazement is none the less, and when it is over, it has become ours. This is especially true of the Dostoevsky who passes so unremarked—the child-like, candid, simple Dostoevsky who wrote ‘An honest thief’ and ‘The peasant Marey’ and ‘The dream of a ridiculous man.’” K. M.
+ Ath p1256 N 28 ’19 850w + Booklist 16:243 Ap ’20
“Fortunately for the reader, Dostoevski’s desperation of human nature drove him to ridicule rather than to melancholy, and for ridicule he was admirably equipped with a lively and stinging wit. Of the ten stories which make up the volume, ‘Uncle’s dream’ is probably the most entertaining.” G. H. C.
+ Boston Transcript p6 F 14 ’20 550w
“Insouciance, self-possession of the absolute much prized French variety, the all containing nonchalance, the iron-nerved sense of form, Dostoevsky apparently cannot claim. His close realism quite lacks easiness and is impersonal in a rough and elemental, not an accomplished way; he has no suggestion of the considered faint irony of Chekhov. His eminence is the eminence of endowment, not of training or consideration; he is the great artist of few accomplishments.” C: K. Trueblood
+ − Dial 68:774 Je ’20 800w
“The stories and sketches in this volume of Dostoevsky are not among his best. His humor is not happy; his compassion is less exercised when he deals with the higher ranks of society. But always there is the incomparable steadfastness of vision and innocence of the imagination that follows life, that does not seek to distort it, and that finds man in his humanity alone.” L. L.
+ − Nation 110:sup488 Ap 10 ’20 110w