Humiliated and Insulted

Oscar Wilde claimed that "Humiliated and Insulted" is not 'at all inferior to that other great masterpiece'; Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel interwoven with eternally topical themes. There is a new take on jealousy, radically different from Shakespeare's; and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and above all of unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships.At the centre of the story is a young struggling author, a traumatised orphaned teenager, and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction but is a powerful and original presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which itself - in concept and execution - affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author. In structure it is more ordered, in plot and characterisation, more succinct and balanced than most of his later novels. The reader throughout is moved, shocked and above all - entertained, but never for a moment wearied.