The article analyses three novels by Fiodor Dostoievski: Poor people, The double and A faint heart. The article has two purposes: firstly, it refuses the usual thesis according to which the Russian author, a proverbial analyst of human soul, would be unconcerned about the social constraints on the action of his personages; secondly, it defends that these social constraints are present in his writings as a "sociological intuition" operated by Dostoievski when he analyses the rank-and-file officials of the Russian bureaucracy in the XIXth century. The text is divided in three parts: the first one describes the state structure of Russian society in the XIXth century; the second part describes the life conditions of the personages and, at last, the third part analyzes the way the Russian author presents the social interaction in which they are inserted.
Dostoievski; novels; russian bureaucracy; sociological intuition