A Bad Business is an enjoyable, sharp and compelling collection of six short stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky. True to his signature style, Dostoevsky allows the reader to truly understand the psyche of his characters amidst a spectrum of emotions ranging from joy, embarrassment, anguish, longing and grief. Each story has its unique premise with its underlying message. Dostoevsky's ability to convey internal dialogue and musings is simply incredible. Do not skip this book if you love Dostoevsky and wish to enjoy a range of short yet compelling stories.

Thank You to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review. This honest review is left voluntarily.

An eclectic collection of six of Master Dostoevsky's stories, fresh off the pens of translators Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, and which are as different as can be.

A Bad Business - about the boss you NEVER want to crash your party. Ever. Ever. Yet he will never realize it. . . he, himself is the gift he gives.

Bobok - or Conversations in a Graveyard - may be my favorite. I love cemeteries, and can totally see this happening. . . .The way the story is told, just rolling out of this man, I settle down and with upturned face receive the language gluing me in place as I listen. It's amusing, and he ends it with a flourish. Immediately I wanted to dash out to a cemetery, find a good seat and wait for sunset. . .

A Meek Creature - a self-important narrator that needs to be smacked tells a story which at its most sorrowful point is acknowledged, but tucked away like napkins after the party, without much thought at all. Part of me was sorrowing, and the rest was very irritated with this man who deserved his alone time!

The Crocodile - straight up fantasy - but hilarious.

The Heavenly Christmas Tree - very Matchstick Girl, I thought, but sweet in a wistful, melancholy way.

The Peasant Marey - a contender for my favorite - recognizing those moments we all have with strangers that are dear and nurturing, made even more so by their anonymity, rarity and out-of-time-ness. I felt he was trying to say something about Poland with this one, and will be researching that to see if I was grabbing on to something author-intended or just making stuff up.

Great introduction to a fantastic writer! So glad that I was able to read this.

A Sincere Thank You to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the translators, Pushkin Press and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review. #ABadBusiness #NetGalley

I’d been putting off embarking on this collection of short stories by Dostoevsky, one of the Russian “greats”. I’m a Russophile, have studied Russian language, history and culture, and read, studied, struggled with and largely not enjoyed Dostoevsky's novels. But then I plucked up the courage and intellectual heft I was expecting to need and set off. And what was immediately apparent was that I had nothing to fear. Much to my surprise these tales are so much more readable and accessible than the novels. I wasn’t prepared for the satire, the sheer humour, the absurdity. Far less intense but equally insightful and perceptive, I was impressed by Dostoevsky’s versatility as demonstrated here. One of the stories, about a man who is swallowed by a crocodile, reminded me of Gogol’s propensity for the absurd, and in fact in another story Dostoevsky actually references Gogol. This collection is a delight, not least for a charming story based on a childhood experience. With far less psychological and philosophical angst, although the darkness and tragedy of life is never completely absent, the book is an ideal introduction to the author - although nothing here really prepares you for the complexity and moral conundrums of the great novels.

I thought that I was going to really enjoy this but I actually struggled with it quite a bit.
Short stories are usually my go-to when I'm wanting something quick to read and, while these were short, they were rather dull. I didn't find any of them particularly memorable at all!

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Dostoyevsky is one of my all time favorite writers, if not THE favorite writer, amd I just couldn't miss the chance when I saw this. Was not disappointed.

My thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for a review copy of this book.

A Bad Business is a set of six short stories by Dostoevsky collected in this ‘Essential Stories’ volume by Pushkin Press. The first four are longer length, and more ‘substantial’ so to speak but all the stories are impactful in their own ways. We touch on different themes and genres—satire to fantasy, humour (the most unexpected for me) to poignancy.

The book opens with the titular tale, ‘A Bad Business’, in which a young and upcoming general Ivan Ilych Pralinsky, just after attending a small party thrown by his former superior and friend, chances upon the wedding of an office (and class) subordinate while walking home. He decides to attend and put to practice his theory of ‘humaneness’ (his word for being on an equal footing with class inferiors) which he had been arguing is just what society needs (although almost immediately after leaving the party, the first thing he has done is to contradict himself). But having already had a fair bit more to drink than he is accustomed to, and having to drink some more out of courtesy at the wedding, things begin to go wrong right from the start, and Pralinsky’s actions, while perhaps only bringing embarrassment to himself, turn the groom, Pseldonimov’s life quite upside down, possibly with lasting consequences. This story explores themes of aspiration/idealism versus practice, class, and also perhaps circumstances since a large part of what happens is because Pralinsky is unused to that much drink. But what really left an impression is how many layers Dostoevsky gives us in this story to explore and to think back over, from the basic story arc of what Pralinsky’s presence at the party does, to the different characters themselves (even guests at the party with smaller ‘roles’ so to speak give us much to think about), and the dynamics between them.

Next was a completely different one, ‘Conversations in a Graveyard’ where an author Ivan Ivanovich, whose original work has met with little success, and who writes advertisements, translates French works, and has written many letters to the editor, ends up spending the night at a graveyard. But no ordinary one, here the dead have conversations with each other, share stories or promise to. We meet a range of curious ‘dead’ people (‘ghosts’?), and equally curious narrator. This is one I think I’ll have to come back to, to get at its significance much more, such as the themes of earthly limitations and so on, no longer being applicable to these dead—be it ‘class’ or shame.

‘A Meek Creature’ gives us a typically complex Dostoevskian narrator. His wife has just committed suicide, which unsettles him (I didn’t want to think ‘obviously’ since this is Dostoevsky’s world, after all), and leads him to think back over all that has happened—from the moment he first came across her, a small, ‘meek’ creature who visits his pawn shop to becoming his wife and what unfolded thereafter. This was probably to me the most characteristically Dostoevskian tale, with plenty of revelations as we go along and a narrator whose motivations and attitudes, in fact his entire psyche, keep one thinking.

Then came the story that in a sense was my favourite in this collection, because of how different it was from his usual writings (or at least what one thinks of as such), satirical though it is. In ‘Crocodile: An Extraordinary Event that Occurred in the Arcade’, Ivan Matveich, a civil servant, is swallowed whole by a crocodile, when visiting an arcade with his wife, Elena Ivanovna, and his friend (the narrator). But that doesn’t mean he’s dead of course. This is for him an excellent opportunity for fame, and he sets about planning how he will make his name in the world—all from inside the crocodile. A satirical tale, which comments on the ‘economic principle’ which alone seems to determine everything in the world (not too different from our current world; and one that is ‘naturally’ beneficial for the haves—who cares what becomes of the have-nots!), this was the funniest one in the whole book. One of my favourite quotes in the book is from this one:

… the crocodilian interior must as be empty, so that abhorring a vacuum, it is forced incessantly to swallow and replenish itself with whatever is at hand … The same is not true of the human organism; the emptier a human head is, for example, the less it feels the urge to fill itself; this is the only exception to the general rule.

The last two, much shorter pieces included ‘The Heavenly Christmas Tree’, the story of a young boy, living in poverty in lodgings with his mother, who is ill. This is a Christmas story as only Dostoevsky can tell it, and one that is at the same time both heartrending and beautiful. The final piece, ‘The Peasant Marey’ is a somewhat autobiographical story, in which the narrator reflects on a kindness, unexpectedly done to him by ‘Marey’ of the title when he was a child, something which stays with him, and reflects in his own attitudes many years later. Another short tale, but with a tender note to it.


While I have read some of Dostoevsky’s novels before, this was my first time reading any of his shorter works. The strength of this collection for me lies in the fact that it showcases a real range of writings in terms of themes and emotions from his pen, many of which I didn’t associate previously with Dostoevsky—be it the humour in ‘Crocodile’ or the poignant and beautiful notes in the ‘Christmas Tree’. An excellent collection.

4.5 stars.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist.

A Bad Business is a new Pushkin collection of short stories; it is a very accessible and readable translation of his writing. A perfect opportunity to gain insight into Russia in the 19th Century while delighting at this author’s way with words. His wit, satire and love for his country, slowly finding it’s place in Europe.

As a teenager I quickly bought Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as a sign of my literary credentials, sadly although I have read Solzhenitsyn to my shame I had not read Dostoyevsky until I had this wonderful chance to find the writer’s short stories in this particular collection.

Pushkin should be applauded in their approach to restoring into English so many worthy authors and through NetGalley making this title available as an ARC.

I have finally found this talented storyteller in my own reading experience and pleasure.

I now feel both confident and comfortable to tackle his novels. This will no longer be to flag up my literary status but a journey of love and appreciation.

This is a new translation of 6 Dostoevsky short stories: all are very good and some are excellent and quite memorable. We see the author's dark sense of humor in some of the stories (my favorites) and his sentimental streak in others.

I can't speak for the translation, but the English reads naturally with no stilted affect.

Anything by Dostoevsky is worth reading, and this collection is no exception.

I didn’t particularly enjoy this collection. I wished the stories were easier to get into and maybe I’d have enjoyed them. It was nice though, that it’s translated

This was an interesting book and I did enjoy it, just very short so would have enjoyed more content, but overall good book.

I don't know how it is, but I've never encountered anyone else quite as capable of rendering inner dialogue as vividly and realistically as Dostoevsky.

His characters have great opinions of themselves, some vague awareness of their defects, occasional embarrassment - they're dreamers exploring possibilities and imagining themselves loved and capable, but falling under self-delusion, correcting themselves again and again, trying to maintain their moral high ground even when they fall piteously.

This volume contains six stories.

"A Bad Business" is the tale of a general who believes himself to be a man of the people, a friend of the little man (he is, in fact, quite full of himself). But his good intentions fall short of realization, and instead of being beloved as a benefactor, he manages to destroy the wedding (and perhaps the life) of a poor man under his command. It's a wonderful story, containing so much tension between the desire to be someone and the actual results of one's actions; the quiet seething of people of lower classes who can't retaliate openly; the entitlement of the upper classes.

"Conversations in a Graveyard (Bobok)" is about a man, possibly mad, who falls asleep in a graveyard and hears the dead wake up and start talking about this and that - only superficial things. In fact, the main character remarks to himself that it's quite unexpected, where one can get their information on Russian society. It's fun, and funny.

"A Meek Creature" is a sad story about a forty year-old pawnbroker who marries a sixteen year-old woman and. For reasons he never understands, she kills herself. From the outside, one can speculate, but it's never resolved: she married him when constrained by poverty; he blew hot and cold; she may have perceived him as threatening; she might have felt guilt for a number of reasons. Who knows, who knows...

"The Crocodile" is a satire - a man gets swallowed whole by a crocodile, and this is now a potentially geopolitical event of great import. It might also affect the economy of Russia.

"The Heavenly Christmas Tree" is a story that reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl": a little boy whose mother dies runs out on Christmas and sees revelers, but is turned away from everywhere, finally dying of the cold.

"The Peasant Marey" is a short story about remembering a kind-hearted peasant from the author's autobiography. Not much happens, but it somehow manages to still be memorable.

To be remembered for ages......................

A Bad Business by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a wonderful narration of human minds and relationships. Filled with humor and satire, the book is going to give you a deep insight into what people think about each other. Although, the book is translated but it did not lose its originality. Each and every makes a different imprint on your mind. An unforgettable book with some beautiful stories. I, not only enjoyed the book but loved it.


I would, definitely, give the book 5 stars. Thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for providing me an opportunity to read and review the book.

A collection of short stories which show the full range of human psyches and Dostoevsky's ability to get right inside them and create fantastic stories which allow such insight into their characters. Each story is so different and I enjoyed them all. There are moments of laugh out loud humour, cringeworthy embarrassment and incredible sadness. I will definitely be reading more of his work.

A thoroughly enjoyable, sharp collection that showcases some of Dostoevsky's shorts.
The wit and satire is evident throughout, which isn't something I would have expected not having read his work before, but which was a wonderful surprise.

This collection of short stories is a delightful read. The satirical humor of Dostoevsky’s writing shines through and makes it a very entertaining experience. However, it suffers from the problem of all short stories collections: some are going to resonate with you more than others. The highlight for me was The Crocodile, it has the level of absurd humor that I’m a big fan of and for that alone was entirely worth reading this book.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an arc for this book!

A Bad Business: Essential Stories – Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated from the Russian by Nicholas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater)

A man eaten by a crocodile. A graveyard where the dead still bicker amongst themselves. An argument and uproar at a wedding. Do these premises sound like the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky?
I have to admit, I went into these stories more than a little apprehensively. My only experience of the author was “Crime and Punishment”, which I didn’t find enjoyable at all, so my expectation was endless moralising and torment of characters.

Much to my surprise and delight, this collection was nothing like that at all. Some of the stories do have the author’s notorious psychological intensity, but there are also moments of real humour and tenderness. Some of them haven’t aged well, in my opinion (not least the comedy German accents in The Crocodile), but others still got me to laughed out loud even today, not least Conversations in a Graveyard. There is tenderness found in The Heavenly Christmas Tree, and it was genuinely interesting to see the stylistic breadth that Dostoevsky put to paper in his lifetime.

However, the briefness of this review doesn’t come out of nowhere, and my biggest gripe with this book comes with the use of “essential”. These might be essential in forming a complete view of the Russian writer’s work and the bigger picture, but I’m not sure that they should be prioritized over his more famous works, hefty though they may be.

All in all, I would recommend this one to fans of 19th century literature, and anyone who wants to see a different side of a notoriously bleak author, but I’m not sure this should be your introduction to his work.

It sounds funny to say I'm writing a review for an ARC of a book by Dostoevsky, but this edition features new translations by Nicolas Pasternak and Maya Slater, and it has the added benefit that I don't believe I've read any of these stories in any other translation before.

The collection as a whole was hit-or-miss for me: I only liked 3 out of the 6 stories. There's also no introduction in the ARC to help contextualize any of the stories or explain why they're grouped together, and I see no indication there will be one in the final print

Here are my thoughts on each story:

1. A Bad Business

Things got off to an inauspicious start for me, as I did not particularly enjoy the first story (and these types of collections often feature the "best" or most well-known story as the opening). I believe it's supposed to be humorous, featuring a general who has high reformation ideals about mingling with the lower classes and "elevating" them while also expressing he believes in everyone's shared humanity; his ideals don't play out as he imagines, however, as when he crashes his subordinate's wedding, he generally makes a mess of things and costs the poor man money he can't afford. I get the general message, but I don't think it's as hard-hitting in modern-day America as I must assume it was in Russia in Dostoevsky's day. I didn't laugh, and I didn't feel as if it really offered me a keen and piercing insight into anything I wanted to ponder more.

2. Conversations in a Graveyard

The second story I found much more entertaining. I was a little wary of the initial paragraphs, as they feature a narrator discussing how awesome he is even though no one appreciates it and then explaining that he felt into pondering the nature of astonishment, and I felt that I was simply in for one of those classic stories that is simply the protagonist sharing their philosophical musings, without much of an actual plot. I was wrong! This story has a bit of the supernatural, features a range of wild and slightly shocking characters in a short pace, and even got me thinking about death and what I would do if I found out I had a little "more time" after death (or what anyone would do, or what they perhaps "should" do). Definitely a winner of a short story..

3. A Meek Creature

The third story is interesting, featuring a narrator who is relating the events of his life after he comes home to find she has killed herself. The reader gets inside his head and can see where he is kind of lying to himself and how he was abusive in ways he didn't recognize or didn't want to, but it's not all black and white, and the ending can make the reader wonder whether things might have been on the verge of improving before the unfortunate suicide..

4. The Crocodile

A story about a guy who is swallowed whole by a crocodile on exhibit in a museum. It's deliciously absurd because only the narrator acts as one would expect 99% of people to react to this event: with horror and great anxiety to find a way to free the unfortunate man. Everyone else reacts unexpectedly. I enjoyed it.

5. The Heavenly Christmas Tree

Incredibly short and really depressing story about a boy whose mother dies around Christmas and wanders about looking for a bit of Christmas magic. I didn't really see the point of the story, to be honest. And the length of this story and the final one was off-putting to me; the stories seem like afterthoughts in this collection.

6. The Peasant Marey

This one is also short and unremarkable, the narrator remembering a semi-insignificant event from his childhood that somehow holds significance for him. I found it an anti-climatic conclusion to the collection..

This is the second collection of classic short stories I’ve read from the Pushkin Press Essential Stories series. The first was I Would Prefer Not To by Herman Melville, an author I had never tried before, and I found it a good introduction to his work. In the case of Dostoevsky, I have previously read two of his novels (Crime and Punishment and The Idiot) but was curious to see what his shorter fiction would be like. This collection contains six stories, all in new translations by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. They are all quite different in subject and style and I think they would give new readers a good idea of what his writing is like, while also being of interest to readers like myself who are only familiar with his full-length novels.

I think my favourite of the six stories was The Crocodile (1865), in which a civil servant, Ivan Matveich, is swallowed alive by a crocodile being exhibited in St Petersburg. There’s not much more to the plot than that, as the rest of the story revolves around the conversations Matveich has with various people from inside the crocodile, but I found it entertaining and surprisingly funny, not something I’ve really associated with Dostoevsky’s work before. It also takes a satirical look at the economic situation in Russia at that time – the German owners of the crocodile refuse to have its stomach slit open to free Matveich because they would be losing their investment, particularly as the crocodile has now increased in value due to becoming so famous!

Conversations in a Graveyard (1873), also published as Bobok, is another satire in which the narrator is sitting in a cemetery after attending a funeral and hears the disembodied voices of the recently buried telling each other their stories. The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin describes this story as “almost a microcosm of Dostoevsky’s entire creative output,” because it involves many of the themes, ideas and character types that appear in his other work. I probably haven’t read enough of Dostoevsky to be able to fully appreciate this, but I did still find the story interesting – and it reminded me very much of Lincoln in the Bardo!

The title story, A Bad Business (1862), follows a general in the civil service who, after discussing his political ideals with friends, decides to test one of his theories by being nice to people from lower social classes. Unfortunately, when he arrives, uninvited and unwelcome, at the wedding feast of one of his subordinates, things quickly begin to go wrong. A very different type of story is A Meek Creature (1876), about the relationship between a pawnbroker and one of his customers, a girl who pawns items to earn money so that she can advertise in the newspaper for work as a governess. This is a darker story than most of the others in the book and not one of my favourites.

The four stories mentioned so far take up more than 90% of the book, which means that the final two are much shorter. One is The Heavenly Christmas Tree (1876), a sentimental and poignant little story with a fairy tale feel, and the other is The Peasant Marey (also 1876), in which the narrator recalls a childhood memory of being comforted by a peasant after convincing himself there was a wolf in the woods. I liked both of these stories but felt that they suffered from being placed at the end of the collection; I would have preferred the shorter stories to alternate with the novella-length ones to provide more variety.

Although I don’t think any of these are stories I would want to read again, apart from maybe The Crocodile, it was good to have the opportunity to explore Dostoevsky further. I’m hoping to read my copy of The Brothers Karamazov soon.

Dostoevsky certainly knew how to lampoon Russian middle and upper class society. I found these six stories a great mix of sad, satire, cynicism and comedy. I would never have thought he could write such a gem of The Crocodile. These are easy to read and an insightful view of Russia in the mid 1800s.

This is a collection of six short stories. Some are indeed short and a few are quite long. One or two are novella length. Dostoevsky highlights the absurdities and cruelties of the political and cultural norms of Russian society.