Uncles

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Book Overview

The small town of Mordasov is all abuzz at the arrival of Prince K-, a wealthy, ageing landowner, after an absence of several years. Maria Alexandrovna Moskalyova, a local gossip and fearsome schemer,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1686041764
• ISBN13: 9781686041761
• Release Date: August 2019
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 57 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A must-read for Dostoyevsky fans.

This was a very good book. I especially enjoyed the first two stories which I read (or rather devoured) with great frenzy. The stories in this book exemplify Dostoyevsky's mastery at depicting how elusive happiness can sometimes be and how human beings can sometimes show, at times, great selflessness and at other times, great selfishness. I recomend this book for those who enjoy books with psychological depth and that emphasize relationships, emotions, and thought-processes, rather than sequences of ''action-filled'' events.

Four very good minor works

Uncle's Dream and Other Stories consists of four stories spread throughout Dostoevsky's career: A Weak Heart (1848), White Nights (1848), Uncle's Dream (1859), and The Meek Girl (1876; also translated as A Gentle Sprit, The Meek One, and A Gentle Creature). Uncle's Dream is the longest of the works, at 130 pages; the others are all about 50 pages. A Weak Heart is set around New Year's Day in St. Petersburg and deals with a clerk named Vasya who has recently become engaged and, conflicted between his ecstasy over his engagement and the pressure he feels due to an impending deadline, drifts into madness. Vasya is somewhat typical of a major type of character from Dostoevsky's early period, namely that of the "dreamer" who has difficulty handling relationships with the outside world, and we also see in A Weak Heart Dostoevsky's interest in madness, which he illustrated at about the same time in The Double. If you've read and liked The Double (and perhaps also Poor Folk) you'll probably enjoy A Weak Heart (and vice versa), but I'd have to say The Double is a better-developed work than this one. White Nights also bears clear stamps of Dostoevsky's early period. It chronicles four nights in which the nameless narrator meets a girl named Nastenka and falls in love with her. Both the narrator and Nastenka are extremely socially isolated--Nastenka because of her overprotective grandmother and the narrator because of his preference for a dream world. Early on, I found the narrator's discussion of his dreams to drag a little bit (though Nastenka was apparenly quite moved by it) but after that point White Nights was an extremely touching story and was probably Dostoevsky's best exposition of his "dreamer" type. Dostoevsky conceived the comic novella Uncle's Dream during the compulsory military service that followed his Siberian imprisonment, and by this time he had shed much of his earlier style. This particular work seems a bit unpopular with the critics--translator David McDuff states in the introduction that The Village of Stepanchikovo, of which Dostoevsky originally planned to make Uncle's Dream a part, was a much better piece--but I found Uncle's Dream to be very entertaining. The "Uncle" of the title is Prince K., a senile member of the high nobility to whom socialite Marya Moskaleva wishes to marry her daughter Zina, expecting that he will promptly die, leaving Zina a grand inheritance and the freedom to remarry whomever she wishes while still living well. Marya wines and dines the Prince and has little difficulty in getting him to propose to Zina, but Mozglyakov, another of Zina's suitors and a distant relative of the Prince, convinces him that his proposal to Zina was nothing but a dream, and hilarity ensues. The novella is a very funny parody of provincial manners, and both Marya and the Prince are amusing caricatures. Granted, this isn't exactly high art, and it's a very good thing that Dosto