Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81) is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. His works include such seminal novels as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Karamazov Brothers.

The small town of Mordasov is all abuzz at the arrival of Prince K-, a wealthy, ageing landowner, after an absence of several years. Maria Alexandrovna Moskalyova, a local gossip and fearsome schemer, decides that he would be an advantageous match for her daughter Zina. But in her endeavours to make such a union come about, she must contend with rival matchmakers and Zina's wilfulness.

Written soon after Dostoevsky was released from the prison camp that inspired The House of the Dead, Uncle's Dream shares very little of that novel's gloomy tone and contains many elements of a light, drawing-room farce. Beneath the surface, however, lies a sharply satirical voice which looks ahead in part to later novels such as Devils.

No novelist ever wrestled with materialism more fiercely and intelligently than Dostoevsky.

The only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.

The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.

The real nineteenth-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!