literature – mcsparran.page

The Adolescent (1875) The novel opens with Arkady trying to find out what kind of man his father, Versilov, is. Most of the tension of Part One revolves around Versilov’s character. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Arkady really wants to know because he looks up to his father as someone toContinue reading

The Notebooks for A Raw Youth (1874) Dostoevsky admires the skill of prominent authors of his day, writers like Leo Tolstoy, but he’s dissatisfied with their understanding of human capability. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, when Bolkonsky sees his rival’s leg being amputated, he discovers he is able to forgive him. Dostoevsky says, that’s greatContinue reading

A Diary of a Writer (1873) A Diary of a Writer is a publication Dostoevsky put out in journal-form every month or so off and on during the last decade of his life. It contains mish-mash of short stories, reviews, essays, reports, sketches, memoirs, and. . . well, one can’t be exhaustive in trying toContinue reading

Unpublished Diaries and Notebooks (1872-1876) Dostoevsky abhors characters and stories that feel “made up.”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