The Russian Soul E-Book

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Dosteovsky's immediate impulse for embarking on A Writer's Diary in 1873 was a desire to come into closer contact with his readers. Published in monthly instalments, it became a unique journalistic enterprise. Far more popular than his novels ever were, the Diary was Dostoevsky's favourite work. Brilliantly introduced by Rosamund Bartlett, the Diary stands revealed as the work of a writer-activist and blogger avant la lettre.

Leseprobe

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was born in Moscow, the son of a physician, and educated at the Military Engineering College in St Petersburg. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was well received. In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for his involvement with a group of Utopian Socialists, the Petrashevsky Circle, only to be reprieved at the last moment. His experience of four years of hard labour and imprisonment in Siberia led to a profound change in his ideology. This is reflected in all his subsequent fictional masterpieces, from Notes from the House of the Dead (1862), to Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), as well as his journalism, including A Writer’s Diary, completed during his last decade.

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, scholar and translator. The author of biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov, she has also published books on Wagner, Shostakovich and the Futurist opera Victory Over The Sun. Her new translation of Anna Karenina was published in 2014, and follows two anthologies of Chekhov stories and a volume of his letters. She has written on Russian literature, art and music for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Apollo, and the Royal Opera House, and worked with institutions such as the National Theatre, the Salzburg Festival and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

–

THE RUSSIAN SOUL

Selections from A Writer’s Diary

–

introduced by

Rosamund Bartlett

‘. . . what truly matters here is that the Russian instinct has not died: the Russian soul, albeit unconsciously, has protested precisely in the name of its Russianness, in the name of its downtrodden and Russian principle.’

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘My Paradox’, June 1876

Contents

– Introduction by Rosamund Bartlett –

– Environment –

– The Boy with His Hand Out –

– The Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party –

– The Peasant Marey –

– The Death of George Sand –

– A Few Words about George Sand –

– My Paradox –

– The Boy Celebrating His Saint’s Day –

– The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story –

–Anna Karenina as a Fact of Special Importance –

– A Lie Is Saved by a Lie –

– Pushkin (A Sketch) –

– Further Reading –

Rosamund Bartlett

– Introduction –

Virulent nationalism, religious extremism, ethnic intolerance, urban deprivation, child abuse, suicide, opinionated criticism, intimate confession, utopian dreaming, genial digression, moral fervour, profound insight, macabre humour and superlative fiction – welcome to the world of Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary. A voluminous and variegated miscellany in which the celebrated author spoke to his readers about issues concerning Russia, mostly directly, but sometimes indirectly via short stories, it is a work as eerily prescient of global preoccupations in the twenty-first century as it is frequently overlooked. Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary was also his creative laboratory. And as a work in which he was ultimately concerned with defining the elusive ‘Russian soul’, which he believed was most perfectly embodied by his forebear Pushkin, it is a source of fundamental importance in understanding the complex mind behind his artistic works.

A unique journalistic enterprise incorporating art and politics, and both non-fiction and fiction, in which Dostoevsky came to perform the roles of sole writer, editor and publisher, is his most original work. And he was adamant that his be regarded as a single oeuvre, on a par with his novels, despite the somewhat piecemeal nature of its publication in monthly installments over the course of what proved to be the last decade of his life. was also Dostoevsky’s favourite work, but it has perennially remained in the shadow of his novels, in both its Russian and anglophone versions, despite the publication in 1994 of a comprehensive and authoritative English edition, from which all but one of the extracts anthologised here are drawn. One of the main reasons for the ’s relative obscurity is its sheer size: with a total number of pages equivalent to two of his novels put together, it is Dostoevsky’s longest literary work. Also slightly daunting is the oddity of its hybrid contents, whose genre – which could be portrayed as a quixotic, probing, perhaps quintessentially Russian take on the essay – Dostoevsky purposefully made hard to categorise. Dostoevsky’s position as a reactionary and ideologically problematic figure after the Revolution did not help. Despite the enormous popularity of during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, it was only ever re-published once during the Soviet period, in 1929, just before Stalin’s Cultural Revolution began placing strictures on the arts. Remarkably, it was not until 2011 that the first properly annotated complete edition was published in Russia (densely printed on fifteen hundred pages).