The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Other Stories

Ten short stories by Dostoevsky in Constance Garnett's translation — the version that first carried him into English at the turn of the twentieth century. The collection takes its title from one of his strangest and most haunting late works: a man on the brink of suicide falls asleep, dreams himself onto a planet of beings who have not yet fallen, watches them fall through his own arrival, and wakes up changed.

Around that centrepiece are nine other stories spanning Dostoevsky's whole career. 'An Honest Thief' and 'The Peasant Marey' show his patience with the small dignity of ordinary people. 'A Novel in Nine Letters' and 'The Husband Under the Bed' show the lighter, almost slapstick Dostoevsky most modern readers don't know exists. 'Bobok' is the dark comic masterpiece of his late period — a cemetery where the recently dead are still talking, and what they have to say about each other is the most unflattering thing Dostoevsky ever wrote about humanity. 'The Crocodile' is a satire on St Petersburg journalism so strange it almost reads as science fiction. 'The Heavenly Christmas Tree' is the closest he came to writing for children, in a story that has broken hearts for a hundred and fifty years.

Garnett's translation has been criticised for smoothing Dostoevsky's rougher edges, and the criticism is fair. But it was her translations that put him on the English-language map, and the prose, whatever its compromises, still carries the unmistakable forward motion of the original.