Humiliated and Insulted

Author: Dostoevsky

Translation: Sami Al-Durubi

Once again, Dostoevsky enters a world brimming with emotions of all kinds. Here we find extreme states of love, affection, compassion, noble stances, and an unlimited willingness to sacrifice, just as we find evil, injustice, hatred, cruelty, tyranny, and pride that leads to foolish actions. In this novel, Dostoevsky presents his vision of the ambiguity and contradictions, even the humiliation, inherent in passionate love, and how this love, when extreme, makes the weaker party pay a heavy price. This is the case with Natasha, who gave her heart and left her family, sacrificing everything without hesitation. She was forced to bear the consequences of this love, confront the evil represented by the Prince, her beloved Alyosha's father, overlook her beloved's childlike weakness and his susceptibility to his whims, and even accept his love for another woman. In addition to the strange characters and their bizarre worlds in the novel, what makes the reader drawn to and passionately follow the novel is the story of the girl Nelly, a child of injustice and suffering, who became a beggar in her childhood so as not to disobey her mother's dying wish not to go to the rich so as not to lose her dignity. Georges Haldas says of the novel: "It is a good introduction to Dostoevsky's labyrinth, of which the novel "Humiliated and Insulted" forms the first stage." Dr. Sami Al-Durubi's translation is not merely a transfer of text into Arabic; rather, it is the creative work of a translator who adored Dostoevsky's works, providing us with a creative translation that Dostoevsky's Arabic readers have acknowledged as unparalleled