This 1983 volume comprises essays written by British and American scholars to mark the centenary of Dostoyevsky's death in 1881. In many respects it is a companion volume to New Essays on Tolstoy published by Cambridge University Press in 1978. The book is divided into two sections. The first part considers specific works; there are essays on Dostoyevsky's early work, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. The second part ranges more widely over aspects of the great novelist's work and includes essays on Dostoyevsky's religious thought, on Dostoyevsky as philosopher, and on formalist and structuralist approaches to Dostoyevsky's work. The volume concludes with a bibliographical survey of British writing on Dostoyevsky. The collection will be of value to anyone with an interest in Russian literature whether in the original language or in translation.
Malcolm Jones, the author of an earlier, widely read book on Dostoyevsky, here approaches his subject afresh in the light of recent developments in Dostoyevsky studies and in critical theory. He takes as his starting point the vexed question of Dostoyevsky's 'fantastic realism', which he attempts to redefine. Accepting Bakhtin's reading of Dostoyevsky in its essentials, he seeks out its weaknesses and develops it in new directions. Taking well-known texts by Dostoyevsky in turn, Professor Jones illustrates aspects of their multivoicedness. In Part 1, he concentrates on the internal, emotional and intellectual, reversals of 'the underground'. In Part 2, he focuses on the disruptive and subversive aspects of the relationships between characters and between text and reader. In Part 3 he examines textual multivoicedness in its diachronic aspect, showing some of the ways in which Dostoyevsky's texts echo and exploit the voices of precursors.
Many Russian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made a huge impact, not only inside the boundaries of their own country but across the western world. The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel offers a thematic account of these novels, in fourteen newly-commissioned essays by prominent European and North American scholars. There are chapters on the city, the countryside, politics, satire, religion, psychology, philosophy; the romantic, realist and modernist traditions; and technique, gender and theory. In this context the work of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, among others, is described and discussed. There is a chronology and guide to further reading; all quotations are in English. This volume will be invaluable not only for students and scholars but for anyone interested in the Russian novel.
