The Insulted and Humiliated (Unizhennye i Oskorblennye)

The novel 'The Insulted and the Humiliated' (1861) was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky during a period of extraordinary upsurge in Russian public life—a time when the publication of a new literary work was perceived as an event of social significance. The appearance of 'The Insulted and the Humiliated' was also perceived in this way. After its publication, N. A. Dobrolyubov assigned Dostoevsky the most honorable place in the 'humanistic' movement of Russian literature. Much in this novel struck readers as unusual: they were confronted with a new ethical and social problem—the problem of egoism. Prince Valkovsky, who unfolds his cynical 'philosophy of life' on the pages of the novel, became the writer's first 'ideological' protagonist, a precursor to The Man from the Underground, Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and other Dostoevsky characters of the 1860s and 1870s.