A Bad Business: Essential Stories

Description

The stories in this collection range from impossible fantasy to scorching satire. A civil servant finds a new passion for his work when he's swallowed alive by a crocodile. A struggling writer stumbles on a cemetery where the dead still talk to each other. An arrogant but well-intentioned gentleman provokes an uproar at an aide's wedding, and in the marital bed. And a young boy finds unexpected salvation on a cold and desolate Christmas Eve. This vivid new translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater illuminates Dostoevsky's dazzling versatility as a writer. His remarkable short fiction swings from wickedly sharp humour to gripping psychological intensity, from cynical social mockery to moments of unexpected tenderness.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. Renowned as a writer and journalist during his lifetime, he spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, and six years of compulsory military service in exile, in punishment for his membership of an intellectual group critical of the tsarist regime. A compulsive gambler who was at times reduced to begging for money from family and friends, he nevertheless produced masterpieces of psychological and existential fiction including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from the Underground, as well as short stories and novellas. Nicolas Pasternak Slater was brought up bilingual in Russian by his mother Lydia, a sister of Boris Pasternak. He has translated Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and an anthology of Lydia Pasternak's writings, as well as translations of work by Pushkin and Tolstoy. He has also translated collections of short stories by Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov for Pushkin Press. Maya Slater has translated and edited work by Moliere, and edited her husband Nicolas Pasternak Slater's translations of work by Boris Pasternak. She is a Senior Research Fellow of Queen Mary University of London.

A sprightly new translation... reminds us how extremely funny [Dostoevsky] could be -- A.N. Wilson * TLS *