The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants: From the Notes of an Unknown (Russian: Село Степанчиково и его обитатели.

Sergey Alexandrovich (Сергей Александрович), the narrator, is summoned from St. Petersburg to the estate of his uncle, Colonel Yegor Ilyich 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.

At Stepanchikovo Foma Fomich is furious because Uncle Yegor has been caught red-handed during an assignation in the garden with Nastenka.

In a letter to his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky wrote: "The long story that I am writing for Katkov displeases me very much and goes against the grain.

But I have already written a great deal, it's impossible to throw it away in order to begin another, and I have to pay back a debt.

Its subject is the intolerable psychological bullying inflicted by the hypocrite and parasite, Foma Opiskin, on his host, Colonel Rostanev.

Foma Opiskin is a weird figure of grotesque, gratuitous, irresponsible, petty, and ultimately joyless evil, that together with Saltykov's Porfiri Golovlev and Sologub's Peredonov form a trinity to which probably no foreign literature has anything to compare.