While his literary reputation rests mainly on such celebrated novels as, and, dostoyevsky also wrote much superb short fiction. Is one of the finest of his shorter works. It appeared in 1846 (his second published work) a...While his literary reputation rests mainly on such celebrated novels as, and, dostoyevsky also wrote much superb short fiction. Is one of the finest of his shorter works. It appeared in 1846 (his second published work) and is by far the most significant of his early stories, not least for its successful, straight-faced treatment of a hallucinatory theme.