Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction

by Edward Wasiolek

"Wasiolek illuminates Dostoevsky's creatures in a series of analyses, which are always lucid and often brilliant…one traces the progress of Dostoevsky's intentions and beliefs, and appreciates once again the variety and subtlety with which he dramatizes the dark forces of the will that underlie our moral judgments."
-- Helen Muchnic, The New York Review of Books

In the past, critics have considered Dostoevsky an artist, thinker, or psychologies, according to their own temperament. Now with the appearance of Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, it is at last possible to see him whole--for in this close, critical reading of Dostoevsky's major works the aesthetic, ideological, and psychological factors are as thoroughly interwoven and interdependent as they are in the novels themselves.

Wasiolek's basic critical concern parallels Dostoevsky's own creative one: the interplay of moral sensibility and raw reality, and especially the dialectic of the will against the world, the intention against the action.

The book provides an analytical and critical treatment of The Double, The Landlady, Netochka Nezvanova, The House of the Dead, The Insulted and the Injured, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Adolescent, The Dream of the Ridiculous Man, and The Brothers Karamazov.

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked out a bunch of books on Dostoevsky from the library while I was reading Crime and Punishment and this one stood out boldly from the crowd. It's a slender tome but provocative enough to jar the Dost. reader out of any too-comfortable interpretive position and set the critical gears spinning.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

best pocket introduction to the major works I've ever found