A Little Hero (Full Version)

Set amid the summer whirl of parties, theatricals, and drawing-room intrigue at a wealthy Russian estate, A Little Hero follows an unusually sensitive eleven-year-old narrator as he discovers the bewildering intensity of first love. Mocked by a flirtatious beauty and silently devoted to the gentle Mme. M., he watches the adult world with a child’s candor—and begins to sense its hidden injuries, jealousies, and quiet humiliations.

Dostoyevsky turns a seemingly light social comedy into a delicate study of awakening conscience: how tenderness and embarrassment can coexist, how a child’s inner life can be vast, and how a single decisive moment can change one’s self-understanding forever. Written with psychological precision and lyrical warmth, the story captures the threshold between innocence and experience, revealing heroism not as spectacle, but as the private resolve to protect another’s dignity.

• Listeners who love Dostoyevsky’s psychological insight in a shorter, more intimate form than the great novels.
• Fans of coming-of-age classics about first love, humiliation, and the sudden formation of moral courage.
• Readers drawn to 19th-century Russian society—its elegance, gossip, and the quiet suffering beneath polite conversation.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) is one of literature’s greatest psychologists, renowned for exploring freedom, guilt, faith, suffering, and moral responsibility. After early success, he endured imprisonment and exile in Siberia—experiences that profoundly shaped his vision of the human soul under pressure. His major works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Alongside these monumental novels, Dostoyevsky’s shorter fiction—such as A Little Hero—displays the same sharp moral perception, rendered with surprising tenderness and nuance.