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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: AudiobookHub 1
Description
In this sharp, unsettling short story, Fyodor Dostoyevsky follows a narrator from a New Year’s children’s party to a society wedding five years later, exposing how status and money quietly dictate human behavior. Amid presents ranked by parents’ importance and a timid boy pushed to the margins, one “honoured guest” reveals a chilling practicality: he calculates a little girl’s dowry as if it were interest accruing in a ledger.
With swift scenes and cutting irony, Dostoyevsky contrasts public gentility with private cruelty, showing how the language of propriety can mask predation and how social ambition can reduce innocence to a transaction. The story’s power lies in its compressed moral drama—comic on the surface, devastating in implication—making it a vivid miniature of the author’s larger themes: conscience, hypocrisy, and the human cost of a world ruled by calculation.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners who want Dostoyevsky in a concentrated form—biting satire, moral urgency, and a memorable final sting.
- Fans of classic social critique about class, money, and the ways “respectable” society normalizes cruelty.
- Book-club listeners looking for a short, discussion-rich work about power, innocence, and complicity.