5 LESSER-known works by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In the Russian literary tradition, there exists the concept of Dostoevsky’s ‘Pentateuch’ – an unofficial list of his five most significant, large-scale novels, written one after the other: ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Idiot’, ‘Demons’, ‘The Adolescent’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. The term alludes to the biblical Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses), underscoring the immense cultural weight these works have come to hold in Russian culture.

Against this backdrop, other works by the author often fade from the reader’s view. Below, we highlight several shorter works that showcase the full range of Dostoevsky’s creative powers and abilities.

‘The Double’ (1846)

An early work, in which the author first explores the theme of a split personality, which became one of the central themes in his body of work. The story follows a minor civil servant named Yakov Golyadkin, who discovers that his own "double" – a man identical in appearance, but possessing an opposite, more cynical and opportunistic traits – is attempting to usurp his place in life and at work. The narrative unfolds not merely as an anecdote, but as an "anatomy of a soul" perishing under the weight of constant humiliation and fear. Although his contemporaries, including critic Belinsky, deemed the novella a failure, later, scholars recognized that it was in it that Dostoevsky first reached the psychological depth and the theme of agonizing duality without which characters like ‘Raskolnikov’ or ‘Ivan Karamazov’ would have been inconceivable. 

‘White Nights’ (1848)

One of the most poetic and luminous works, often described as a "sentimental novel". In it, Dostoevsky created, for the first time, a vivid and fully realized portrait of a "St. Petersburg dreamer" – a solitary, impressionable individual, who dwells in a world of his own illusions, ultimately unable to confront harsh reality. This novella served as a crucial milestone in his early career: it not only encapsulated his creative explorations during the 1840s, but also introduced a theme that would define his entire subsequent body of work – the tragic clash between dreams and reality. While the plot is a simple tale of unfulfilled love, ‘White Nights’ marks the first instance where Dostoevsky reveals the profound fragility of the inner world of a person who lives entirely through their imagination.

‘The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants’ (1859)

An unexpectedly comic, almost farcical work, written following the author’s return from exile in Siberia, a novel he considered his best work at the time. Beneath the guise of a lighthearted story about a petty, parasitic hanger-on named Foma, who tyrannizes the family of a good-natured colonel, Dostoevsky explores the psychology of power and submission with remarkable intensity. The primary comedic engine of the text is a character reminiscent of Molière’s ‘Tartuffe’. Although it went largely unnoticed by his contemporaries, ‘The Village of Stepanchikovo’ serves as a vital bridge between Dostoevsky’s early writings and his great novels; the archetypes he developed in it – the despotic "prophet" and the "positively beautiful" (virtuous) human being – foreshadowed the characters who would later populate his major works. 

‘Notes from Underground’ (1864)

This short novella is often described as a turning point in Dostoevsky’s body of work and a prologue to all his great novels. In it, he fully realizes the figure of the "underground man" – an unnamed former civil servant, who, in his confession, argues with a painful, almost mocking candor that human beings are irrational by nature and refuse to submit to any "rational" laws. Stylistically, the novella was revolutionary: instead of a smooth, authorial narrative, the reader encounters the feverish, disjointed and polemical speech of a protagonist who is constantly arguing with an unseen interlocutor – a technique that seems to blur the line between character and author. In terms of its themes, the novella anticipates existentialism and its influence on 20th-century philosophy and literature – extending to thinkers and writers like Camus and Sartre – has been immense.

‘A Gentle Creature’ (1876)

A small masterpiece from Dostoevsky’s later period, which the author himself labeled a "fantastic story", even though it contains nothing supernatural. The entire work is a feverish monologue delivered by a man standing before the coffin of his wife, who had just taken her own life, as he struggles, in agony, to understand where he went wrong. Anticipating Proust and Joyce, Dostoevsky employs a "stream of consciousness" to capture the state of a man in shock, breaking apart the conventional logic of literary prose to mirror the movement of the character’s thoughts and emotions. The characters are not given names – they are simply a man and a woman – which lends the story a universal, almost parabolic quality. ‘A Gentle Creature’ stands apart in Dostoevsky’s body of work: it’s not merely another story about tragedy, but a ruthless psychological experiment, in which the author explores the nature of guilt, submissiveness and silent resistance.