Dostoevsky and the 1860s

Catalog description

While Dostoevsky is often praised for the universality of his themes, in his own day he was a working journalist deeply engaged with the issues facing his own contemporary Russia. This course will seek to contextualize a few of Dostoevsky’s major works by reading them as they were originally written: as part of an ongoing and often heated debate with his contemporaries. We will begin with the distinction between the 1840s and the 1860s that Dostoevsky made famous first in Notes from Underground (1864), then moving on to read Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872) in the context of the intense debates that drove the latter decade. Our particular focus will be Russian nihilism, above all as it was defined by Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, and also the “woman question,” especially as developed in the works of two women writers, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and Sofiia Kovalevskaya. We will finish with Nabokov’s extravagant send-up of Chernyshevsky and Russian nihilism in The Gift (1938). The Golden Age of Satire: Criminals, Castaways, Couplets, and Kings