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Unpublished Diaries and Notebooks (1872-1876) Dostoevsky abhors characters and stories that feel “made up.” “As soon as an artist tries to turn away from truth,” he says, “he will immediately become ungifted and at that very moment will lose all his talent.” At first, this seems a strange stance for a fiction writer. How canContinue reading

Demons (1872) Part 2 Dostoevsky’s novel Demons escalates to its catastrophe when a group’s cherished political opinions lead them to murder an innocent man. Soon after the gun fires, one of them, Virginsky, loses his mind and starts screaming, “This is not it, this is not it! No, this is not it at all!” AnotherContinue reading

Demons (1872) Part 1 Dostoevsky’s Demons is such a complex novel that it can be read many different ways. This time reading it, I was struck by a similarity it shares with his previous masterpieces: Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot. All of these books are preoccupied with the question, can peopleContinue reading

The Notebooks for The Possessed (1869-1872) More than any of Dostoevsky’s previous writings, the Notebooks for The Possessed show his exploration of political ideas. He seems to have set out to try to demonstrate the problems of the social utopianist beliefs of many of the leading Russian intellectuals at the time, (people like Chernechevsy, whoContinue reading

Letters (1872-1877) Dostoevsky criticizes the literary world of his time for being conventional, ambiguous, phony, dull—in short, lacking in sincerity and directness. Why? He thinks that this is what happens to writers who are too afraid of appearing ridiculous. Sometimes the truth of one’s experience is laughable, and if one becomes too preoccupied with avoidingContinue reading

The Eternal Husband (1870) Velchaninov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Eternal Husband, is haunted by his conscience. A part of him knows that he has done wrong and has a longing to make it right. Trusotsky, a man whom Velchaninov had cuckolded, suddenly reappears in Velchaninov’s life. Velchaninov is a serial adulterer, andContinue reading

The Idiot (1868) In his novel, The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky is interested in getting closer to reality, the ground beneath our feet. But how do we get there? The novel’s hero, Myshkin, says, “I know about an actual murder over a watch, it’s in all the newspapers now. If a writer had invented it, theContinue reading

Letters (1868-1871) When Dostoevsky was early in the process of writing the novel Demons, he told a friend that “I want to have my say, even if in the process my artistry should perish.” This statement is striking because it reveals a battle within him. He has convictions that he wants to air, yet whatContinue reading

Crime and Punishment (1866) Crime and Punishment is one of the most powerful reading experiences I’ve ever had. It hits me in a deeper way than most novels do. Why? I can’t answer that fully, but I think a factor that may be contributing to this soul-level experience has to do with the novel’s senseContinue reading

The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (1866) Whenever I read an amazing finished work like Crime and Punishment, I often imagine that the book, in all it’s brilliance, just plopped into Dostoevsky’s head, ready made. I was reassured to find in his working notebooks that this was not the case. He took many of theContinue reading