A Dostoevskii Companion

The powerful prose of Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers today. A Dostoevsky Companion: Texts and Contexts aims to help students and readers navigate the writer’s fiction and world and to better understand the cultural and sociopolitical milieu in which he lived and wrote, offering new paths for interpreting his writing.

Katherine Bowers is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia. A specialist in nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, she is currently completing a monograph about gothic fiction’s influence on Russian realism.

Connor Doak is a lecturer in Russian at the University of Bristol. He works primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, with a special interest in gender and sexuality in Russian culture. He has authored articles on authors including Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Petrushevskaia and Pushkin, and is currently working on a study of masculinity in Maiakovsky’s poetry.

Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of the monograph, The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s (2013), as well as articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Veselovsky.

“This extremely valuable addition to Academic Studies Press’s Cultural Syllabus Series is aimed primarily at undergraduate students, although it is sure to be of interest to scholars of Dostoevsky. It offers a comprehensive collection of excerpts from Dostoevsky’s literary works, nonfiction, letters, and notebooks, as well as selections from important critical articles about his life and works. … Each chapter ends with a welcome, selected bibliography of works on the subject of the chapter. Given the enormous number of works on Dostoevsky (‘Who has not written a book on Dostoevsky?’), this is very useful for future reference. … We are fortunate to have this new companion to studying Dostoevsky.” —Michael Katz, Middlebury College, Slavic and East European Journal

“I found this book both eminently readable and a comprehensive and invaluable re-source for Dostoevskii scholars, no matter at what level they research. The Anglo-Canadian editorial team of Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak and Kate Holland are to be congratulated on assembling a rich textual and contextual feast that repays detailed study.” —John Cook, University of Melbourne, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, Vol. 33

Vladimir Golstein, Brown University:

“This fascinating and useful collection combines Dostoevsky’s own texts (fictional excerpts, letters, articles) with a number of illuminating essays to shed light on various aspects of the author’s life, work, and thought. Designed with undergraduate students in mind, the collection, edited by Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak, and Kate Holland, will be of great help to students and to those who teach them, capturing what professors talk about when they talk about Dostoevsky.” —Vladimir Golstein, Brown University, Russian Review Vol. 78, No. 2