Bowers, K. and Holland, K., eds. (2021). Dostoevsky at 200: the novel in modernity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Abstract

The review is devoted to a co- authored monograph on F. Dostoevsky’s poetics published to mark the bicentenary of his birth. It includes chapters on the problems and characteristic features of realism, subjects, and genre and the most representative motifs in the writer’s oeuvre. The reviewer finds that of the most interest are chapters that attempt to study Dostoevsky’s novels in the context of science (the chapters on the polemic with I. Sechenov’s theory and the  reception of G. H. Lewes’s ideas), ideology (the chapters on the structure of Dostoevsky’s novels with reference to the imperial ideology of autocracy), or economy (the chapter on female capitalists in Dostoevsky’s works). The methodology of the book will be equally useful to Dostoevsky scholars and researchers specializing in 19th-c. literary realism. The chapters that discuss the motif of a duel and the gothic narrative in Dostoevsky’s books and offer an original interpretation of famous texts unaffected by the historic context and the established scholarly tradition, while providing a fresh perspective, indicate certain limitations.