Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings

Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1997-07-20

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0810114739

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A collection of articles, sketches, and letters spanning 33 years in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing career, from 1847, just after the successful publication of his first novel, until 1880, a year before his death. This volume allows the reader to measure the broad scope of his artistic development and the changes that occurred as a result of such cataclysmic events as Dostoevsky's arrest and trial for treason and his subsequent imprisonment and exile in Siberia.


Man is a Mystery. It Must Be Unraveled...

Man is a Mystery. It Must Be Unraveled...

Author:

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2001-01-11

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0595160654

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“Let me tell you, dear heart, it can happen that you go through life without knowing under your very nose there is a book in which your life is described in the minutest detail. What you have never even noticed before, you gradually remember, as you start reading such a book, and find out and discover... some books you read and read and you can’t make head or tail of them, however much you try. It is so damn clever that you can’t understand a word of it... But you read a book like that and feel as though you had written it yourself, just as though – how shall I put it? – as though you had taken possession of your own heart – whatever it might be – had turned it inside out for people to see, and described it all in detail – that’s how it is! And how simple it is, good Lord! Why, I could have written it myself! Why, indeed, shouldn’t I have written it myself!” from Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoyevsky


Memoirs from the House of the Dead

Memoirs from the House of the Dead

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780192838681

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In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante's Inferno. Terror and resignation - the rampages of a pyschopath, the brief serence interlude of Christmas Day - are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces.