
“ have managed to capture and differentiate the characters’ many voices…They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky’s wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns…A capital job of restoration.Marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. “The merit in this edition of Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators…They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life.” – New York Times Book Review “Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English…The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version.” – Chicago Tribune “The best currently available…An especially faithful re-creation…with a coiled-spring kinetic energy… Don’t miss it.” – Washington Post Book World “It may well be that Dostoevsky’s, with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” – New York Review of Books “One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” – New York Times Book Review Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of world literature. But it was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-69), The Possessed (1871-72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. Petersburg only a full ten years after he had left in chains. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he returned to St. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution, when suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence.

In prison he was given the "silent treatment" for eight months (guards even wore velvet soled boots) before he was led in front a firing squad.

A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846) brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevskys life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote.
