Customer Reviews

A Gentle Creature and Other Stories: White Nights; A Gentle Creature; and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (The World's Classics)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This excellent collection has three of Dostoevsky's best short works: "White Nights," "A Gentle Creature," and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." Ranging from great to masterful, they are essential for anyone even remotely interested in Dostoevsky and a good starting point before tackling his mammoth novels. However, as they are available in collections with additional stories -- such as The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky --, this is not the best choice. That said, anyone who comes across it and has not read the stories would do well to get it.

"White" is one of Dostoevsky's most intensive love meditations and, indeed, one of the most profoundly searching and affecting - not to mention thorough and honest - investigations of the perennial subject. He shows many of its sides, including those most writers and people ignore, with such realism and emotion that they come across as powerfully as ever - and surely always will. Though missing some of his later depth, this is in many ways one of Dostoevsky's most timeless works. It is also interesting in his canon in that the narrator prefigures some of his more famous characters, especially the Underground Man.

"A Gentle" may be Dostoevsky's best short story, a masterpiece in many ways as great as his novels. Moving well beyond his early short works' directness, it is a complex, multi-layered piece that can be legitimately interpreted in many ways. The psychological depth for which his novels are so justly famous is here in full force, as is his strong first-person voice. The narration is indeed one of the highlights, as Dostoevsky uses several techniques - unreliable narrator, stream of consciousness, etc. - not common until about half a century later. This shows his vast originality and influence, but the story also has many core strengths, especially a focus on perennial Dostoevsky themes: suicide, mental instability, love's dark side, egotism's evils, and other heavy psychological, philosophical, and social themes.

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" is one of Dostoevsky's best, most original, and most influential short stories. It epitomizes several of his defining preoccupations - alienation, Christian charity, etc. - and is a preeminent example of his characteristic psychological realism. A first-person tour de force, it shows yet again that no one matches him for psychological verisimilitude. It is also heavy on his core philosophical concerns and, perhaps most notably, pioneered important concepts that had not even been defined, namely psychoanalysis and solipsism. One can easily see why Freud frequently cited Dostoevsky, as this story essentially prefigured much of his work on dreams by several decades. Fantastic as the story is in some ways - recalling the wilder flights of Paradise Lost and arguably even being almost a science fiction precursor -, it is one of Dostoevsky's most moving and deeply human works.

Wherever one chooses to read them, these stories are required reading.