The Friend of the Family - (Pushkin Press Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A blustering interloper and a meek aristocrat struggle for control of a country estate, in this comic novel by the author of Crime and Punishment.

"Avsey's excellent translation and stimulating introduction and notes enable the reader to appreciate this novel, and its weird humour, to the full." -- Telegraph

Full of pace, effervescence and grotesque comedy, this short novel by the renowned author of Crime and Punishment represents an antic mode insufficiently known to English readers, and presented here in the first translation since Constance Garnett's version of the 1920s.

Set on a remote country estate, the story concerns a household completely under the sway of the despotic charlatan and humbug Foma Fomich Opiskin, one of the most notorious creations in Russian literature. The owner of the estate, Colonel Rostanev, a meek, soft-hearted giant of a man, is cruelly dominated by Opiskin. With deftly controlled suspense amid a teeming variety of wildly eccentric minor characters, the novel builds up to a confrontation between these two. Will Rostanev give way to Opiskin's cruelty and sacrifice the love of his life? Or will his sense of honor finally push him to resist the tyrant's demands?

Written in the year of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's return to St Petersburg after his exile, it is perhaps his most important early work. It is the link between Gogol and Chekhov; it is almost Dickensian in its comic proliferation of imaginative characters. In the chaos which spreads out from the roiling center of the dominant Opiskin, Dostoevsky draws a picture of a Russia on the verge of upheaval and transformation.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) trained as an engineer and began his literary career with translations. As punishment for reading books banned by the Tsar, he was subjected to a mock execution and sent into exile in Siberia in his twenties. Subsequently he worked exclusively as a writer, touring Europe and publishing novels and journalism. Addicted to gambling, he was often near starvation. A second, very happy marriage to typist Anna Snitkina helped to stabilize his manner of living, and with her practical assistance he went on to write some of his greatest works, and to earn his lasting reputation as one of the dominant figures of world literature.

Ignat Avsey (1938-2013) was born in Latvia but later moved to the United Kingdom. He was Senior Lecturer in Russian Language and Literature at the University of Westminster, and translated many major works into English, including Dostoevsky's The Karamazov Brothers and The Idiot.