Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He has written many works of fiction including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. He died in St. Petersburg on 9th February 1881.Natasha Randall is a writer and literary translator. Her translations include We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. Her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, Los Angeles Book Review and more.

This excellent Canongate Canons edition has an enlightening and entertaining introduction by DBC Pierre . . . Dostoevsky chips away at complex human motivation with persuasive stylistic tools, succeeding in being hilarious and heart-rending in a single sentence (after all, "mankind is a comical construction"), captured in this beautiful translation by Natasha Randall. It's through elegantly excavating the particularities of his era that Dostoevsky strikes upon timeless truths, and with perspicacious analysis of behaviour, tunnels through to hidden depths