Descend into the cemetery and listen to the dead speak. Read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strangest, most savage, and most overlooked masterpiece completely free online.
Published in 1873, Bobok is Fyodor Dostoevsky at his most unclassifiable. It is a short story, barely twenty pages. It is a satire, a fantasy, a philosophical dialogue, a comedy, a horror tale. It is also, according to its author, “a story of absolutely no use.” This is a joke. Bobok is useful in the way that scalpel is useful: it cuts.
The frame is simple. A failed writer, Ivan Ivanovich, attends a funeral. The service bores him. The eulogies irritate him. He wanders into the cemetery and lies down on a grave. And then, from beneath the stones, he hears voices. The dead are talking. Not the newly dead, still clinging to their earthly identities, but the half-dead, the in-between, the residents who have not yet decomposed into silence. They gossip, they scheme, they confess. They have discovered a secret: in the grave, there is no shame. They can say anything, admit anything, be anything. And they are, as a result, utterly, monstrously, hilariously vile.
On this page, you can experience the story that Dostoevsky buried in his Diary of a Writer and that readers have been excavating ever since. We offer the complete 1873 tale for online reading.
Book Info
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Bobok |
| Author | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Year of Publication | 1873 |
| Genre | Satire, Philosophical Fiction, Short Story |
| Language | English Translation (Original: Russian) |
| Legal Status | Public Domain Worldwide |
| Format | Online Reading |
Read Bobok Online
Lie down on the cold stone and listen. Begin this underground masterpiece by entering the cemetery interactively below.
This preview introduces the narrator’s melancholy and his accidental eavesdropping. However, the full, corrosive narrative—the general who cannot relinquish rank, the lady who confesses her adulteries, the philosopher of decomposition, and the mysterious word “bobok”—is available in the complete text for our subscribers.
A subscription unlocks this essential work of Russian absurdism and the complete short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Discover the laughter that echoes from the grave.
About the Story Bobok
Bobok is a joke about death. It is also a joke about life, about literature, about the pretensions of the human animal. It is the funniest thing Dostoevsky ever wrote, and it is also one of the most despairing.
The Narrator: Ivan Ivanovich
Ivan Ivanovich is a type familiar from Dostoevsky’s longer works: the underground man, the failed intellectual, the observer excluded from life. He is irritable, self-pitying, secretly convinced of his own superiority. He attends a funeral not out of grief but out of boredom. He lies on a grave not out of reverence but out of fatigue. He hears the dead speaking and does not flee; he takes notes. He is, in other words, a writer. His instinct is not to pray or mourn but to record.
The Society of the Dead
The dead have organized themselves. They have a hierarchy, a social code, a conversational style. The general insists on his rank; the ladies demand deference; the intellectual delivers lectures. They have brought their vanities with them into the grave. This is Dostoevsky’s satirical target: not death but the refusal to die, the persistence of social performance even when the audience has rotted away.
The Secret of the Grave
One of the corpses explains the unique condition of the recently dead. For the first two or three months, the body decomposes slowly, and consciousness lingers. The dead can speak, hear, remember. They can also, crucially, confess. In life, shame inhibits self-revelation. In the grave, shame decays along with the flesh. The dead say exactly what they think, admit exactly what they have done. The result is not purifying confession but endless, gleeful depravity.
Platon Nikolayevich: The Philosopher
The most articulate of the corpses is a middle-aged gentleman named Platon Nikolayevich. He theorizes their condition. He proposes that the grave offers a unique opportunity: “We are, as it were, still alive, but we are no longer subject to the laws of the living.” He imagines a “society for organized shamelessness,” a collective project of total honesty. The other corpses embrace the idea with enthusiasm. Their conversation descends into a chaos of mutual exposure and accusation.
Bobok
The word “bobok” appears at the end, uttered by one of the corpses. It has no meaning. It is nonsense, a noise, the sound of a mind decomposing. Ivan Ivanovich, listening, is disgusted. He leaves the cemetery. He writes his account. He cannot forget what he has heard. He cannot, despite his disgust, stop thinking about bobok. The word sticks. It is the residue of the encounter, the trace of the dead in the living mind.
The Tradition of the Talking Corpse
Dostoevsky was drawing on a long tradition of dialogues with the dead, from Lucian to Fontenelle. But he transforms the convention. His dead do not offer wisdom from beyond the veil; they offer gossip, spite, and nonsense. The grave does not elevate; it degrades. There is no revelation, only exposure. The afterlife, in Dostoevsky’s vision, is not a judgment but a continuation—the same pettiness, the same vanity, the same shame, now stripped of the pretense that conceals it.
The Context of Composition
Bobok appeared in the first issue of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, a monthly periodical he wrote and edited alone. The Diary was his platform for direct engagement with readers, unmediated by editorial oversight. He published journalism, criticism, memoir, and fiction. Bobok is the fictional centerpiece of the first issue, surrounded by essays on education, literature, and politics. It is, among other things, a commentary on the state of Russian society in the 1870s—a society that seemed, to Dostoevsky, morally decomposed but not yet silent.
Why Read the Story Bobok Today?
Because it is short, strange, and unforgettable. Because it demonstrates that Dostoevsky, the great tragedian of the novel, was also a comic genius. Because it asks a question that no other writer has asked with such precision: What would we say if we were finally free of shame? The answer is not edifying. It is, however, extremely funny.
FAQ
What does “bobok” mean?
Nothing. It is nonsense. Various critics have proposed etymologies—it resembles the Russian word for “bean” or the sound of a small object falling—but these are speculations. The word is defined by its meaninglessness. It is what remains when meaning has decomposed.
Is this story connected to Notes from Underground?
Thematically, yes. Both works feature an embittered, isolated narrator who observes society from a position of exclusion. Both works satirize the pretensions of rationalism and progress. But Bobok is shorter, stranger, and funnier. It is Notes from Underground compressed into a cemetery anecdote.
Why is it not as famous as Dostoevsky’s novels?
Dostoevsky is known primarily for his long fiction. His short stories, with the exception of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and “White Nights,” are relatively neglected. Bobok is also genuinely odd—too comic for readers expecting Dostoevskian tragedy, too bleak for readers expecting comic relief. It falls between categories and has never found its audience. This is beginning to change.
Is this a horror story?
It is a horror story in the same way that a bad dream is horror. There are no monsters, no violence, no explicit threat. But the vision of consciousness persisting in the decomposing body, of social performance continuing beyond death—this is genuinely disturbing. The horror is metaphysical.
Can I read it on my phone?
Yes. It is twenty pages. You can read it in an hour. You will not forget it.