The Heavenly Christmas Tree

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It must have happened on Christmas Eve in some great town in a time of terrible frost. I have a vision of a boy, a little boy, six years old or even younger. This boy woke up that morning in a cold damp cellar. He was dressed in a sort of little dressing-gown and was shivering with cold. There was a cloud of white steam from his breath, and sitting on a box in the corner, he blew the steam out of his mouth and amused himself in his dullness watching it float away...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sovereign
• Release date: Feb 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911263067

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian author and journalist. He spent four years in prison, endured forced military service and was nearly executed for the crime of reading works forbidden by the government. He battled a gambling addiction that once left him a beggar, and he suffered ill health, including epileptic seizures. Despite these challenges, Dostoevsky wrote fiction possessed of groundbreaking, even daring, social and psychological insight and power. Novels like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, have won the author acclaim from figures ranging from Franz Kafka to Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Heavenly Christmas Tree

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LONDON ∙ NEW YORK ∙ TORONTO ∙ SAO PAULO ∙ MOSCOW

PARIS ∙ MADRID ∙ BERLIN ∙ ROME ∙ MEXICO CITY ∙ MUMBAI ∙ SEOUL ∙ DOHA

TOKYO ∙ SYDNEY ∙ CAPE TOWN ∙ AUCKLAND ∙ BEIJING

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Published by Sovereign Classic

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First published in 2016

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Contents

THE HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS TREE

DOSTOYEVSKY CLASSICS

THE HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS TREE

I am a novelist, and I suppose I have made up this story. I write I suppose, though I know for a fact that I have made it up, but yet I keep fancying that it must have happened somewhere at some time, that it must have happened on Christmas Eve in some great town in a time of terrible frost.

I have a vision of a boy, a little boy, six years

Reviews for The Heavenly Christmas Tree

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Two very short Christmas stories. The Heavenly Christmas Tree was much the better one, a poignant vignette of a poor boy rejected by others at Christmas in the freezing cold (4/5). The Christmas Tree and the Wedding was also about a put upon small boy, but weaker and not very Christmassy.