The Master of Petersburg

The main hero of “Autumn in Petersburg” is Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, who in autumn 1869 returns to St. Petersburg to investigate the tragic death of his stepson. The writer is beside himself with grief and barely copes with epileptic seizures. The landlady of the apartment where the deceased lived becomes a real obsession for him. However, Dostoevsky is firmly determined to find the truth—did Pavel die by his own death? was he a revolutionary? did he love his adoptive father or despise him? To answer these questions, Fyodor Mikhailovich will have to stand against Sergei Nechaev—a clandestine revolutionary and the evil genius of Petersburg.

The mastery of Kootzee and Sergey Ilyin—the author of the Russian translation of the novel—is such that when reading “Autumn in Petersburg,” we may well believe that we are facing a previously unknown Dostoevsky novel. Read a masterpiece of world literature in a inspired, congenial translation!