Humiliated and Insulted
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Humiliated and Insulted
Published in Russia in 1861, Ignat Avsey's translation was published by One World Classics in 2008.
The novel
Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is not "at all inferior to the other great masterpieces" and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which - in concept and execution - affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author.