Novelas y relatos (1859-1862)

This second volume of Dostoyevsky's Complete Works brings together the novels that the author wrote upon rejoining civilian life after four years in confinement in Siberia, accused of anti-Zarist activities, and five years in the army near the border with China. For nearly a decade Dostoevsky has been absent from the Russian literary world into which he had made a brilliant entrance with his first novel Poor People. And the fruit of his creative effort to rejoin the temporarily lost world are the novels that make up this volume: Uncle's Dream, The Village of Stepánchikovo and its inhabitants, Humiliated and Offended, and Notes from the Dead House. The first two were conceived as humorous novels, critical of the old provincial aristocracy and the inhabitants of small Russian cities. Humiliated and offended, he moves the action to Petersburg, a city that the author calls "half-mad", where the human person is crushed, crushed, sunk. Despite the admiration that Tolstoy felt for Humiliated and Offended, the work with which Dostoyevsky regains fame is Notes from the Dead House, a novel in which he works for eight years, aware of its importance. In it, he focused his attention not so much on his experiences in the Ormsk prison as on the life and character of the people who surrounded him in the prison. The story transcends the limits of the Siberian prison and becomes one of the culminating works of Dostoyevsky's work for its purpose of analyzing the human condition in extreme situations.