Among the great novels of the world, The Brothers Karamazov stands preeminent. It captures and conveys the highest exaltation and the deepest humiliation of the human spirit;; it proves [sic] the soul and reveals, with profound psychological clairvoyance, the plight of man in search for some truth about himself. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky the mystic and the realist at last come into accord, and by his compassion and understanding he creates one of the enduring novels in Russian and world literature. Other novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the Modern Library are: Crime and Punishment (No. 199) and The Possessed (No. 55).

[Text on back of DJ]

“In all the later imaginative work of Dostoyevsky it is impossible to separate the ideological from the artistic conception.  These are novels of ideas, in which the characters, for all their enormous vitality and individuality, are after all only atoms charged with the electricity of ideas.  It has been said of Dostoyevsky that he ‘felt ideas,’ as others feel cold and heat and pain.  This distinguishes him from all other imaginative writers—the same faculty of ‘feeling ideas’ is to be discovered only in certain great religious thinkers, in St. Paul, St. Augustine, Pascal, and Nietzsche.”
--from D.S. Mirsky’s A History of Russian Literature in the Vintage Russian Library