The Dostoevsky Collection

A man is swallowed whole by a crocodile at a Petersburg arcade and finds, inside the beast, the ideal conditions for a lecture series on political economy. A government official crashes his subordinate's wedding in a spirit of liberal generosity and ends the evening in a condition too humiliating to describe. A lonely young man spends four white nights on a canal bridge with a young woman who is waiting for someone else, and understands, by the fourth night, exactly what that means for him.

The Dostoevsky Collection - Part 3 moves across the full range of his shorter work - from the gleeful satirical savagery of The Crocodile and An Unfortunate Story to the lyrical tenderness of White Nights, from the compulsive self-exposure of Mr. Polzunkov to the direct, intimate observations of Petersburg life in A Spring in the City. Together they reveal a writer of far greater tonal range than his reputation for darkness might suggest: capable of genuine comedy, genuine tenderness, and the kind of precise social fury that lands without warning in the middle of what appeared to be a farce.

Five works, five registers, one undeceivable eye.