Within Uncle's Dream and The Permanent Husband are two of Dostoyevsky's novellas. Uncle's Dreams is narrated with objectivity, satire, and social reportage in its comic send-up of small-town manners and morals. It has been described as "one of the most powerful studies of despair in world literature, a banging on closed doors imagined with absolute fearlessness." The Permanent Husband involves a psychotic game of cat-and-mouse I which Velchaninov feverishly wonders what Pavel Pavlovitch knows about his late wife's affair. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer and philosopher whose literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia.