Uncle's Dream and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: a few of these stand out
Review: I found Uncle's Dream to be a very draggy agitating story about a bunch of small-town, small-minded people. The only interesting part is about 2 pages long and towards the end of the story. However, there are 3 other stories included in this book. A Weak Heart was pretty interesting, White Nights is extremely depressing but very vividly written. Finally, "The Meek Girl" is short but very mentally and emotionally involving. Dostoyevsky's manner of narration throughout the stories borders on wordy and agitating but at least it has a very unique style. This book is not a "must read" but it was surprisingly interesting.

Rating:
Summary: a few of these stand out
Review: I found Uncle's Dream to be a very draggy agitating story about a bunch of small-town, small-minded people. The only interesting part is about 2 pages long and towards the end of the story. However, there are 3 other stories included in this book. A Weak Heart was pretty interesting, White Nights is extremely depressing but very vividly written. Finally, "The Meek Girl" is short but very mentally and emotionally involving. Dostoyevsky's manner of narration throughout the stories borders on wordy and agitating but at least it has a very unique style. This book is not a "must read" but it was surprisingly interesting.

Rating:
Summary: A must-read for Dostoyevsky fans.
Review: This was a very good book. I especially enjoyed the first two stories which I read (or rather devoured) with great frenzy. The stories in this book exemplify Dostoyevsky's mastery at depicting how elusive happiness can sometimes be and how human beings can sometimes show, at times, great selflessness and at other times, great selfishness. I recomend this book for those who enjoy books with psychological depth and that emphasize relationships, emotions, and thought-processes, rather than sequences of ''action-filled'' events.

Rating:
Summary: Four very good minor works
Review: Uncle's Dream and Other Stories consists of four stories spread throughout Dostoevsky's career: A Weak Heart (1848), White Nights (1848), Uncle's Dream (1859), and The Meek Girl (1876; also translated as A Gentle Sprit, The Meek One, and A Gentle Creature). Uncle's Dream is the longest of the works, at 130 pages; the others are all about 50 pages.

A Weak Heart is set around New Year's Day in St. Petersburg and deals with a clerk named Vasya who has recently become engaged and, conflicted between his ecstasy over his engagement and the pressure he feels due to an impending deadline, drifts into madness. Vasya is somewhat typical of a major type of character from Dostoevsky's early period, namely that of the "dreamer" who has difficulty handling relationships with the outside world, and we also see in A Weak Heart Dostoevsky's interest in madness, which he illustrated at about the same time in The Double. If you've read and liked The Double (and perhaps also Poor Folk) you'll probably enjoy A Weak Heart (and vice versa), but I'd have to say The Double is a better-developed work than this one.

White Nights also bears clear stamps of Dostoevsky's early period. It chronicles four nights in which the nameless narrator meets a girl named Nastenka and falls in love with her. Both the narrator and Nastenka are extremely socially isolated--Nastenka because of her overprotective grandmother and the narrator because of his preference for a dream world. Early on, I found the narrator's discussion of his dreams to drag a little bit (though Nastenka was apparenly quite moved by it) but after that point White Nights was an extremely touching story and was probably Dostoevsky's best exposition of his "dreamer" type.

Dostoevsky conceived the comic novella Uncle's Dream during the compulsory military service that followed his Siberian imprisonment, and by this time he had shed much of his earlier style. This particular work seems a bit unpopular with the critics--translator David McDuff states in the introduction that The Village of Stepanchikovo, of which Dostoevsky originally planned to make Uncle's Dream a part, was a much better piece--but I found Uncle's Dream to be very entertaining. The "Uncle" of the title is Prince K., a senile member of the high nobility to whom socialite Marya Moskaleva wishes to marry her daughter Zina, expecting that he will promptly die, leaving Zina a grand inheritance and the freedom to remarry whomever she wishes while still living well. Marya wines and dines the Prince and has little difficulty in getting him to propose to Zina, but Mozglyakov, another of Zina's suitors and a distant relative of the Prince, convinces him that his proposal to Zina was nothing but a dream, and hilarity ensues. The novella is a very funny parody of provincial manners, and both Marya and the Prince are amusing caricatures. Granted, this isn't exactly high art, and it's a very good thing that Dostoevsky didn't stick to comedy for his whole career, but this particular piece works quite well and is an enjoyable change of pace from Dostoevsky's more serious novels.

The Meek Girl, which Dostoevsky published in his serialized Diary of a Writer, is an experimental work which attempts to capture the thoughts of a husband hours after his wife kills herself by jumping out a window. As he does quite often throughout his oeuvre, Dostoevsky shows his talent for psychology extremely well in this story; if I didn't know anything about the story before reading it I would have been sure it was written in the 20th century. The one vague problem that I had with the work is that the wife's motivations throughout the events discussed barely come through, but that's not really a fair criticism: this is meant to be a portrait of the husband's still-unorganized thoughts, and in fact if he had understood his wife's motivations well enough to narrate them to us, she probably wouldn't have killed herself. In all of Dostoevsky's work I really can't think of such a fine portrayal of despair as this one.

If you've read this far, you're probably a fan Dostoevsky's work, in which case I would definitely recommend this collection. Though his more famous novels deserve their praise, these works contain a wide variety of the attributes that made Dostoevsky such a great writer, and probably deserve more attention than they get.