Book description
Netochka Nezvanova - a ?Nameless Nobody? - tells the story of a
childhood dominated by her stepfather, Efimov, a failed musician who
believes he is a neglected genius. The young girl is strangely drawn to
this drunken ruin of a man, who exploits her and drives the family to
poverty. But when she is rescued by an aristocratic family, the abuse
against Netochka?s delicate psyche continues in a more subtle way,
condemning her to remain an outsider - a solitary spectator of a
glittering society. Conceived as part of a novel on a grand scale,
Netochka Nezvanova remained incomplete after Dostoyevsky was exiled to
Siberia for ?revolutionary activities? in 1849. With its depiction of
the suffering, loneliness, madness and sin that affect both rich and
poor in St Petersburg, it contains the great themes that were to
dominate his later novels. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Russian
novelist, journalist, short-story writer whose psychological penetration
into the human soul had a profound influence on the 20th century novel.
Among his most famous works, Notes from Underground, Crime and
Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-69), and The Possessed (1872). An
epileptic all his life, Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg on February 9
(New Style), 1881.
