Winner of the AATSEEL Outstanding Translation Award

This is the first paperback edition of the complete collection of writings that has been called Dostoevsky's boldest experiment with literary form; it is a uniquely encyclopedic forum of fictional and nonfictional genres. The Diary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame it incorporated an astonishing variety of material: short stories; humorous sketches; reports on sensational crimes; historical predictions; portraits of famous people; autobiographical pieces; and plans for stories, some of which were never written while others appeared in the Diary itself.

FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY (1821–1881) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Although Dostoyevsky began writing books in the mid-1850s, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. He wrote eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and three essays and is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

"An essential document for understanding this greatly flawed, greatly gifted master."  —American Scholar

"Illuminates an entire stretch of Russian cultural history, and is indispensable on this score alone."  —London Review of Books