A nameless man has made up his mind: tonight, he will end his life, certain that nothing in the world — least of all himself — matters. Before he can act, he falls asleep in his chair and dreams himself across the universe to a distant, unspoiled Earth, where humanity still lives in a state of pure, uncorrupted love. He is happy there for the first time in his life. And then, almost without meaning to, he ruins it. Dostoyevsky's shortest major work compresses the questions that occupy his largest novels — despair, meaning, moral responsibility, the possibility of paradise — into a single feverish night. It ends not in tragedy but in an unlikely, hard-won conviction: that kindness is not naive, it is the only thing standing between us and the abyss. A short read with the weight of everything else he ever wrote.
