Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity

"This is an academic book, after all, aimed at Dostoevsky specialists who already know what Dostoevsky has to say and want to analyze his texts rather than expound his message — as an academic book should."

Sheldon Goldfarb, The Ormsby Review

"The ten chapters of this exceptionally well curated volume converge at the intersection of genre and historical contingency to consider how Dostoevsky’s formal innovations emerged in response to the challenges of his time … The aim is not comprehensive coverage, but rather depth and originality of the readings, which come together into a thought-provoking conversation."

Irina M. Erman, College of Charleston, The Russian Review

“An invaluable read for every student and teacher of Dostoevsky’s works as well as anyone interested in the poetics of the realist novel.” Irina Reyfman, Columbia University, Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Dostoevsky at 200 is an essential resource for anyone researching or teaching Dostoevsky: the essays are consistently original, stimulating, and lucid. The volume's masterful introduction provides not just a survey of the wide-ranging works that follow but also thoughtful accounts of modernity and genre and of these fraught categories' key importance in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition."

Anne L. Lounsbery, Department Chair and Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University

"The scholarship in this invigorating collection situates Dostoevsky’s great novels within the fraught intellectual culture of their time, when the new sciences of statistics, economics, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology challenged traditional cultural, religious, and family values and hurled Russia to the brink of modernity. A model for true interdisciplinarity, impeccably written and edited, Dostoevsky at 200 tells its own story, a story of how criticism keeps literature alive."

Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Duke University, and President, International Dostoevsky Society

"Dostoevsky – rebel and patriot, prophet and ironist – is wonderfully served by this collection of ten bicentennial essays. Each chapter reminds us anew of Dostoevsky’s astonishing creative synthesis: everything is disintegrating (marriages, bodies, plots, faith systems), and yet out of the rubble he devises a more glorious novelistic form than the old stable one, non-reductive, non-mechanistic, baffling, utterly of our time."

Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

"An outstanding collection by a brilliant new generation of Dostoevsky scholars. These essays focus on new topics – science, capitalism, family relations, the material world – and on some familiar topics treated in new ways. Highly recommended for all readers of Dostoevsky."

William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor Emeritus of Literature, Harvard University