White Nights, Poor Folk and The Gambler

Three novels from three turns of Dostoevsky's career, with the stories that stand between them. Poor Folk (1846), the exchange of letters that made him famous overnight; White Nights (1848), four nights on the Petersburg embankments with a dreamer who has never spoken to a woman; Notes from Underground (1864), the underground man's argument against reason itself; and The Gambler (1866), dictated in twenty-six days to meet a contract, with the roulette tables of Roulettenburg standing in for everything the author could not stop doing. Four early stories, A Faint Heart and A Little Hero among them, complete the volume. Ninety-nine plates of mountains, grottoes and portraits by painters including Albert Bierstadt and Ilya Repin carry the same northern light and restless interior weather that runs through these Petersburg tales.