Fyodor Dostoevsky - Humiliated and insulted. Gift book bound in leather

The problem of selfishness and Dostoevsky's first ideologue hero

The novel "Humiliated and Insulted" was created by F. M. Dostoevsky in the era of an extraordinary rise in Russian public life, in an era when the publication of a new literary work was perceived as a socially significant event. This was how the appearance of the novel "Humiliated and Insulted" was perceived. After its publication, N. A. Dobrolyubov gave Dostoevsky the most honorable place in the "humanistic" direction of Russian literature: "In a downtrodden, lost, depersonalized person, he finds and shows us the living, never-suppressed aspirations and needs of human nature, takes out in the very depths of the soul the hidden protest of the individual against external, violent pressure and presents it to our judgment and sympathy." Many things in this novel seemed unusual to readers: a new ethical and social problem was posed to them - the problem of selfishness. Prince Valkovsky, who unfolds his cynical "philosophy of life" on the pages of the novel, became the first "ideologue" hero in the writer's work, the predecessor of a Man from the underground, Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov and other Dostoevsky heroes of the 1860s and 1870s.