Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Friend of the Family: Or, the Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitantsâ

The Friend of the Family: Or, the Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitantsâ

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Avsey, Ignat

Paperback

Series: Pushkin Press Classics

Classic FictionGeneral Fiction

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 1805331655
ISBN13: 9781805331650
Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
Published: May 26 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.61
Height: 1.11 Width: 5.05 Depth: 7.73
Language: English
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.

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