Fyodor Dostoevsky: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1821 to 1881
Quick answer: Dostoevsky as a short story writer: "White Nights", "A Gentle Creature", "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", and how his monologues carry a plot.
Quick facts
- Born: 1821, Moscow
- Died: 1881, St Petersburg, aged 59
- Wrote in: Russian
- Known for: "White Nights", "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "A Gentle Creature"
- Signature move: The monologue that cross-examines itself
- Start with: "White Nights" (1848)
Dostoevsky is a novelist first, and the short fiction can look like sketches for the big books. Read on its own terms it is something else: a laboratory for the voice that talks itself into and out of positions, which he perfected in Notes from Underground and then used in stories a tenth the length. The stories are where you can see the method without the crowd scenes.
What he actually does on the page
He writes a speaker who argues with an imagined objector. In "A Gentle Creature" (1876, also translated as "The Meek One") a pawnbroker paces beside the body of his sixteen-year-old wife, who has thrown herself from a window, and tries to explain to nobody how it happened. He anticipates the reader's accusation, denies it, concedes half of it, then denies the concession. The story is the record of a man failing to acquit himself.
He gives the sentimental setup a hard floor. "White Nights" (1848) is four nights of a lonely dreamer talking with a girl, Nastenka, who is waiting for another man. When the other man returns she goes to him, and the dreamer thanks her for a single moment of happiness. It reads as tender until you notice how exactly Dostoevsky has recorded a young man choosing fantasy over life, and how the choice will cost him everything.
He uses the dream or the vision as a plot engine, not decoration. In "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877) a man resolves to shoot himself that night, is stopped by a child begging for help, dreams he has fired the shot and been carried to an unfallen Earth, corrupts it, and wakes converted. The dream changes the decision made on page one. Structure, in Dostoevsky, is always a change of mind.
The signature move
The self-cross-examining monologue is dissected best in "A Gentle Creature". The pawnbroker was dismissed from his regiment for refusing a duel; he married a poor girl and decided to win her respect by silence, by a system. He tells us about the morning she stood over him with a revolver while he pretended to sleep, and he tells it as a triumph, because he did not flinch. Then he tells how, months later, he threw himself at her feet in sudden love, and how she went to the window a few days after. Dostoevsky never enters the wife's head. The plot happens entirely in the gap between what the man says he did and what the reader can see he did, and that gap is a technique you can practise.
Stories to read first
Six stories, from 1848 to 1877.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The fever pitch. Dostoevsky's narrators shout, repeat themselves, and tell you five times what they told you once, and in his hands the excess is character; in yours it will be noise unless the voice is as exactly built as his. His hostility to Jews and Poles surfaces in the journalism and some fiction, and should be named rather than excused. Take the argument-with-oneself; police the length.
Life at a glance
- 1821: Born in Moscow, where his father was a doctor at a hospital for the poor
- 1846: Poor Folk brings instant fame; The Double follows the same year and is dismissed
- 1848: "White Nights" and "An Honest Thief"
- 1849: Arrested with the Petrashevsky circle, sentenced to death, reprieved on the scaffold and sent to hard labour in Omsk
- 1864: Notes from Underground
- 1876: "A Gentle Creature" appears in A Writer's Diary
- 1877: "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
- 1881: Dies in St Petersburg a few months after finishing The Brothers Karamazov
What writers can take from this
- Write the accusation your narrator fears and let him answer it unprompted.
- Put the plot in the gap between what a speaker claims and what he shows.
- Make every dream or vision change a decision already made.
- Let a sentimental scene carry an unsentimental cost.
- Cut a Dostoevskian monologue by a third and see whether it gets stronger; it usually does.
Try it yourself
A person sits alone the night after doing something they cannot undo (sending the letter, closing the door, selling the ring). Write their account in under 1,000 words as a monologue that keeps answering an accuser who is not in the room. The reader should reach a verdict the speaker never reaches.
Questions
What is Fyodor Dostoevsky's best short story?
"A Gentle Creature" (1876) is the one critics rate highest; "White Nights" (1848) is the most loved, and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877) the most quoted.
How did Dostoevsky influence the short story?
He showed that a single speaking voice, arguing with itself, could carry a whole plot. The unreliable, confessional monologue in modern fiction, from Camus's The Fall onward, descends from his short pieces and from Notes from Underground.
Is Dostoevsky hard to read?
The novels are long and dense; the stories are the easy entrance. "White Nights" runs to about fifty pages and reads in an evening, and several stories are in the public domain in good translations.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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