Село Степанчиково и его обитатели or The Village of Stepanchikovo (also known in English as The Friend of the Family) is a novel written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and first published in 1859. In it, Sergey Aleksandrovich (Сергей Александрович), the narrator

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

, is summoned from Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

to the estate of his uncle, Colonel Yegor Ilich Rostanev (Егор Ильич Ростанев), and finds that a middle-aged charlatan named Foma Fomich Opiskin (Фома Фомич Опискин) has swindled the nobles around him into believing that he is virtuous despite behavior that is passive aggressive, selfish, and spiteful.

External links

• Full text of The Village of Stepanchikovo in the original Russian
• The Village of Stepanchikovo, review at The Lectern, February 12, 2009