Humiliated and degraded

Publisher's Note: Once again, Dostoevsky enters a world filled with emotions of all kinds. Here we find extreme cases of love, affection, compassion, noble attitudes, and unlimited readiness for sacrifice. We also find evil, injustice, hatred, cruelty, tyranny, and pride that leads to foolish actions. In this novel, Dostoevsky presents his vision of the ambiguity, contradictions, and even humiliation inherent in overwhelming love. He shows how this love, and this is the case of Natasha, who gave her heart and abandoned her family, sacrificing everything, can be extreme, with the weaker party paying a heavy price without hesitation. She was forced to bear the consequences of this love, confront the evil represented by the prince, the father of her beloved Alyosha, overlook her lover's childish weakness and his submission to his desires, and even accept his love for another woman. In addition to the novel's remarkable characters and its strange worlds, what truly captivates the reader and keeps them eagerly engaged is the story of Nelly, a girl born of injustice and suffering, who becomes a beggar in her childhood to avoid disobeying her mother's dying wish: that she never go to the wealthy lest she lose her dignity. George Haldas says of the novel: "It is a good introduction to Dostoevsky's labyrinth, of which 'The Insulted and Humiliated' is the first stage." Dr. Sami al-Durubi's translation is not merely a rendering into Arabic; it is the creative work of a translator deeply in love with Dostoevsky's works, resulting in a masterpiece that Arabic readers of Dostoevsky have acknowledged as unparalleled.