Novel in Nine Letters - 1847
A Gentle Creature - 1876
A Little Hero - 1849
This booklet consists of three short stories, but I liked the "Novel in Nine Letters" the best. It's the correspondence between two men who somehow always manage to miss each other.
Dostoevsky said of this: "When I was penniless the other day, I visited Nekrasov. While I was sitting with him, the idea came to me to write a novel in nine letters. When I returned home, I finished the novel in one night. In the morning, I brought the manuscript to Nekrasov and received 125 rubles for it."
In this story, you can tell that Pyotr Ivanych wants something from Ivan Petrovich and vice versa. One excuse for why the meeting doesn't take place follows another. Very funny.
I had already read "The Gentle One" in another collection. (see here) Also an interesting story about the beginning and end of a relationship and how it all came about.
I found the actual story, or rather the one that adorns the title, rather boring. An eleven-year-old falls in love with his cousin, and the "gentlewomen" of society make this the subject of their amusement, making fun of him, and embarrassing him. Nevertheless, it's a Dostoyevsky story and therefore worth reading in its own right.
From the back cover:
"At that time I was nearly eleven, I had been sent in July to spend the holiday in a village near Moscow with a relation of mine called T., whose house was full of guests, fifty, or perhaps more.... I don't remember, I didn't count. The house was full of noise and gaiety. It seemed as though it were a continual holiday, which would never end. It seemed as though our host had taken a vow to squander all his vast fortune as rapidly as possible, and he did indeed succeed, not long ago, in justifying this surmise, that is, in making a clean sweep of it all to the last stick."
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