The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Peters burg. He is contemplating the ridiculousness of his own life, and his recent realisation that nothing matters to him any more. It is this revelation that leads him to the idea of suicide. He reveals that, some months before, he had bought a revolver with the intent of shooting himself in the head.Despite a dismal night, the narrator looks up to the sky and views a solitary star. Shortly after seeing the star, a little girl comes running towards him. The narrator surmises that something is wrong with the girl's mother. He shakes the girl away and continues on to his apartment.Once in his apartment, he sinks into a chair and places the gun on a table next to him. He hesitates to shoot himself because of a nagging feeling of guilt that has plagued him ever since he shunned the girl. The narrator grapples with internal questions for a few hours before falling asleep in the chair.He descends into a vivid dream. In the dream, he shoots himself in the heart. He dies but is still aware of his surroundings. He gathers that there is a funeral and that it is he who is being buried. After an indeterminate amount of time in his cold grave, water begins to drip down onto his eyelids.

Mad – Foolish – Ridiculous – I've been called many things. On an uneventful Wednesday in a drab Borough of East London, an ordinary man has a startling revelation: life is an unhappy accident in a meaningless universe. He gets himself a gun. But before he can use it, he dreams of an innocent, alternative earth, where people live in harmony with nature and each other. Elated, he sets out to tell the world about his dream and share his new vision of a happy planet. Dostoevsky's tragic-comic adventure The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is transported to 21st-century London in a one-person tale of wonder with an urgent warning for our world, adapted by Laurence Boswell. A funny and serious story of hope, that with love and trust we can build a better world. Maybe. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Marylebone Theatre in March 2024.

The first-rate collection includes "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," "Bobok," "The Christmas Tree and the Wedding," and five other short masterpieces.

Dostoyevsky was never shy to play with the issues of human mind in his work. A funny man's dream is one of his shorter pieces that, nevertheless, lacks none of the profundity or the mind-bending power of his larger works.

A rich and idle man confronts his dead mistress's husband in this psychological novel of duality. Powerful and accessible, it offers a captivating and revealing exploration of love, guilt, and hatred.

This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature. Among Dostoevsky's prototypical characters is Yemelyan in The Honest Thief, whose tragedy turns on an inability to resist crime. Presented in chronological order, in David Magarshack's celebrated translation, this is the definitive edition of Dostoevsky's best stories.

Written close to the end of the great writer's life, Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" tells of a transformation of the heart and a journey from despair to joy: a joy that can be known by all through the experience of God that transcends a simply rational discourse. In this eye opening literary study, the title character and his spiritual metamorphosis are examined in depth in light of the ancient concept of Nous as it developed from the Greek philosophers to the Christian fathers. By comparing the "Ridiculous Man" to similar characters in Dostoevsky's corpus, the author shows how an Orthodox Christian understanding of the Nous underpins Dostoevsky's own anthropology and how his literary works in turn guide the reader toward a truer vision of humanity.