First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcile-able relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an 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 in concept and execution affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author.