A Writer's Diary: Volume 1: 1873-1876 (Writer's Diary, 1873-1876) - Softcover

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810115166 ISBN 13: 9780810115163

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The essential entries from Dostoevsky's complete Diary, called his boldest experiment in literary form, are now available in this abridged edition; it is a uniquely encyclopedic forum of fictional and nonfictional genres. A Writer's Diary began as a column in a literary journal, but by 1876 Dostoevsky was able to bring it out as a complete monthly publication with himself as an editor, publisher, and sole contributor, suspending work on The Brothers Karamazov to do so.

The Diary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame it incorporated an astonishing variety of material: short stories; humorous sketches; reports on sensational crimes; historical predictions; portraits of famous people; autobiographical pieces; and plans for stories, some of which were never written while others appeared later in the Diary itself. A range of authorial and narrative voices and stances and an elaborate scheme of allusions and cross-references preserve and present Dostoevsky's conception of his work as a literary whole.

Selected from the two-volume set, this abridged edition of A Writer's Diary appears in a single paperback volume, along with a new condensed introduction by editor Gary Saul Morson.

About this title

Review:

"Illuminates an entire stretch of Russian cultural history, and is indispensable on this score alone." --London Review of Books

"An essential document for understanding this greatly flawed, greatly gifted master." --American Scholar

About the Author:

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: ; IPA: [ f odar m I xajlav Itc dasta jefsk Ij]; 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881 ) sometimes spelled Dostoevsky, was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Although Dostoyevsky began writing books in the mid-1850s, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. He wrote eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and three essays and is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0810115166
• ISBN 13: 9780810115163
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 805
• Editor: Lantz Kenneth