Village of Stepanchikovo

Dostoyevsky's fifth medium-lenght fictional work, 'The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants,' was published in 1859, the year of his return to St. Petersburg from exile. It represents a side of its author insufficiently known to English-speaking readers- his humour. It is a superb comic tale. At the same time, it tries out certain themes of Dostoyevsky's full maturity. Set on a remote country estate, the story concerns a household completely under the sway of the despotic charlatan and humbug Foma Fomich Opiskin, whose sententious utterance contains a good deal of satire on the reactionary Gogol. The owner of the estate, the retired Colonel Rostanev, is a meek, kind-hearted giant of a man, cruelly dominated by Opiskin. With deftly controlled suspense, the novel builds up to a confrontation between these two.