The powerful, impassioned, and often frenetic prose of Fedor Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers in the twenty-first century, even though we are far removed from Dostoevsky's Russia. A Dostoevsky Companion: Texts and Contexts aims to help students and readers navigate the writer's fiction and his world, to better understand the cultural and sociopolitical milieu in which Dostoevsky lived and wrote. Rather than offer a single definitive view of the author, the book contains a collection of documents from Dostoevsky's own time (excerpts from his letters, his journalism, and what his contemporaries wrote about him), as well as extracts from the major critical studies of Dostoevsky from the contemporary academy. The volume equips readers with a deeper understanding of Dostoevsky's world and his writing, offering new paths and directions for interpreting his writing.

The powerful, impassioned, and often frenetic prose of Fedor Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers in the twenty-first century, even though we are far removed from Dostoevsky's Russia. A Dostoevsky Companion: Texts and Contexts aims to help students and readers navigate the writer's fiction and his world, to better understand the cultural and sociopolitical milieu in which Dostoevsky lived and wrote. Rather than offer a single definitive view of the author, the book contains a collection of documents from Dostoevsky's own time (excerpts from his letters, his journalism, and what his contemporaries wrote about him), as well as extracts from the major critical studies of Dostoevsky from the contemporary academy. The volume equips readers with a deeper understanding of Dostoevsky's world and his writing, offering new paths and directions for interpreting his writing.

In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside - a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. In fact, its legacy is much more enduring, persisting within later Russian literary movements. Writing Fear explores Russian literature's engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. Katherine Bowers shows how these practices shaped literary realism from its romantic beginnings through the big novels of the 1860s and 1870s to its transformation during the modernist period. Bowers traces the development of gothic realism with an emphasis on the affective power of fear. She then investigates the hybrid genre's function in a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address social and political issues such as urban life, the woman question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, Writing Fear challenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.

Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siecle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siecle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism, alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.

Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siecle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siecle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism, alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.