The Crocodile is a great piece of satire, unjustly suppressed in the Soviet Union and ignored in the West. This wild lampoon is satirical and vicious, dreamlike, sometimes scatalogical, one of the funniest things that Dostoevsky ever wrote. In the Soviet Union, for political rasons, it has never been published separately (and only infrequently even in the many-volume academy editions). Dostoevsky's hatred of communism and socialism is rarely so direct and apparent as in this tale. He utterly ridicules the "new men," making Chernyshevsky a laughing-stock by having a Chernyshevsky think-alike get swallowed by a crocodile--only to survive and preach socialist theories from the belly of the crocodile.