A young man returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium with no money, no guile and an incurable habit of telling the truth, and walks into a society that cannot decide whether to worship him or destroy him. Dostoevsky set out to write a wholly good man and produced the most painful of his novels: here kindness itself does the damage. Paintings of Petersburg salons, candlelit confrontations and winter streets; the Gilded Library ornament is a burning candle, scattered cards and the iron rail of the embankment.