Overview

This volume explores the Russia where the great writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), was born and lived. It focuses not only on the Russia depicted in Dostoevsky's works, but also on the Russian life that he and his contemporaries experienced: on social practices and historical developments, political and cultural institutions, religious beliefs, ideological trends, artistic conventions and literary genres. Chapters by leading scholars illuminate this broad context, offer insights into Dostoevsky's reflections on his age, and examine the expression of those reflections in his writing. Each chapter investigates a specific context and suggests how we might understand Dostoevsky in relation to it. Since Russia took so much from Western Europe throughout the imperial period, the volume also locates the Russian experience within the context of Western thought and practices, thereby offering a multidimensional view of the unfolding drama of Russia versus the West in the nineteenth century.

Full Product Details

9781108712736

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Deborah A. Martinsen is Associate Dean of Alumni Education and Adjunct Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. She is author of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure (2003; in Russian 2011), editor of Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (1997), and co-editor of Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (with Cathy Popkin and Irina Reyfman, 2014). Olga Maiorova is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (2010) and has edited several books, including a two-volume edition of previously unpublished works by the major nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Leskov (1997–2000, in Russian) with Ksenia Bogaevskaya and Lia Rosenblium.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available