How to Use This Book

Abstract

Fedor Dostoevskii’s popularity and relevance as a writer have not dwindled over time. Indeed, as Rowan Williams points out, the subjects of Dostoevskii’s fiction—from absent fathers and child abuse to terrorism and the nature of national identity—are the quintessential anxieties of the twenty-first century.1 Crime and Punishment remains the embarkation point for many readers setting out to discover Russian literature, and students remain fascinated by Raskol'nikov’s Theory of Great Men, intrigued by the Underground Man’s sardonic ramblings, and awed by their encounter with the Devil in Brothers Karamazov. Though courses focused on a single author are not as common as they once were, a class simply titled “Dostoevskii” can still attract substantial enrollments. His writing also figures heavily in survey courses that cover nineteenth-century Russian literature, and his works regularly show up in surveys of the European novel, as well as classes on “Great Books,” as one might expect. However, as disciplinary boundaries become more porous, Dostoevskii increasingly features in syllabi in other fields. Students might encounter “Notes from Underground” in a philosophy class, Demons in political science, The Idiot in divinity school, or Brothers Karamazov in an advanced seminar on Law and Literature, to give but a few examples. Such variety would not come as a shock to the author, a polymath who rejected the idea of art for art’s sake and whose own fiction unabashedly tackled social, political, and theological questions. Therefore, although A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts is written primarily from the perspective of literary studies, we hope that this collection will speak to those interested in Dostoevskii as a thinker as well as a writer. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, Biography and Context, opens with a chapter on the early Dostoevskii, supplying background