In this short story about the dream of a man who sees no point in living and decides to kill himself. In his dream he visits a utopian land. Over the course of the dream he charts the descent of this land into the modern world. The man then wakes up from his dream a changed man.

This is Dostoevsky's return to the theme of Jesus and an attempt to reconcile a world both moving forward in science and liberalism and moving backward in vile deceit and greed. The narrator is again a bit like Prince Myshkin - his ridiculosness is merely his pessimism in a world that can only be propelled forward - urging us all to participate rather than push away.

Dostoevsky, in a few pages, draws the descent of man and our entire evolution from a hunter-gathere society into the modern world. From simplicity to complexity but above all from general peace to utter emotional violence.

Distoevsky at the end brilliantly claims that much of the problem with the modern world is that we have used science and religion to define what we need instead of using them to get what we need - we need happiness not merely the knowledge of it, we need life not merely the knowledge of it.