Three novels from three turns of Dostoevsky's career, with the stories that stand between them. Poor Folk (1846), the exchange of letters that made him famous overnight; White Nights (1848), four nights on the Petersburg embankments with a dreamer who has never spoken to a woman; Notes from Underground (1864), the underground man's argument against reason itself; and The Gambler (1866), dictated in twenty-six days to meet a contract, with the roulette tables of Roulettenburg standing in for everything the author could not stop doing. Four early stories, A Faint Heart and A Little Hero among them, complete the volume.