Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment ~ The Gambler ~ Notes From the Underground (Great Classic Library)

From Wikipedia: Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: ????? ?????????? ???????????; IPA: [?f?od?r m???xajl?v??t? d?st??jefsk??j] ( listen); November 11, 1821 - February 9, 1881[1]) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays.[2] He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. ~ His name has been variously transcribed in English, his first name sometimes being rendered as Theodore. This is because, before the post-revolutionary orthographic reform which, amongst other things, replaced the Cyrillic letter ? ('th') with the Cyrillic letter ? ('f'), Dostoyevsky's name was written ??????? (Theodor) ??????????? ???????????. ~ Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. With the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground (1864), which has been called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann.[3] He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.[4] ~ Dostoyevsky's father, Mikhail and grandfather, Andrey, were born in modern central Ukraine.[5][6] Mikhail was a doctor and a devout Christian, who practised at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. ~ Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky, the second of seven children.[7] The family lived in a small apartment in the Mariinsky Hospital grounds. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas near a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoyevsky, whose interest in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent in his life and works.