Robin Feuer Miller

Words, silences, and narratives as vehicles are always in flux, always fueling us, precipitating actions both virtuous and criminal, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, sublime and ridiculous. Dostoevsky, more than any other writer except perhaps Shakespeare, supplies an unending source of inspiration for the full sweep of human action, thought, emotion, and belief in all their contradictory manifestations and combinations. Dostoevsky’s journeys onto these terrains are without exception unfinished, always in process, alive and precariously so, even as those inspired by him may find for themselves completion, rationales, and answers. His readers have given various names to the quality of completion embedded within uncertainty that his oeuvre conveys and which can then serve to engender religious, philosophical, or nakedly political discourses and responses, some of which would no doubt surprise, even horrify him. Dostoevsky, however, continues to stand apart; his written words, silences, and narratives expressing, through their embodiment in characters, his own unfinished journey. Ivan Karamazov’s rebellious philosopher maybe have walked his quadrillion kilometers in the dark, but their mutual creator still travels on.

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major worksJoseph Frank (1918–2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career—from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank’s unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major worksJoseph Frank (1918–2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career—from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank’s unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

How does Dostoevsky’s fiction illuminate questions that are important to us today? What does the author have to say about memory and invention, the nature of evidence, and why we read? How did his readings of such writers as Rousseau, Maturin, and Dickens filter into his own novelistic consciousness? And what happens to a novel like Crime and Punishment when it is the subject of a classroom discussion or a conversation? In this original and wide-ranging book, Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller approaches the author’s major works from a variety of angles and offers a new set of keys to understanding Dostoevsky’s world. Taking Dostoevsky’s own conversion as her point of departure, Miller explores themes of conversion and healing in his fiction, where spiritual and artistic transfigurations abound. She also addresses questions of literary influence, intertextuality, and the potency of what the author termed “ideas in the air.” For readers new to Dostoevsky’s writings as well as those deeply familiar with them, Miller offers lucid insights into his works and into their continuing power to engage readers in our own times.

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel— The Brothers Karamazov—in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today “remains harrowingly alive in the face of our present day worries, paradoxes, and joys,” observes Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller. In this engaging and original book, she guides us through the complexities of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, offering keen insights and a celebration of the author’s unparalleled powers of imagination. Miller’s critical companion to The Brothers Karamazov explores the novel’s structure, themes, characters, and artistic strategies while illuminating its myriad philosophical and narrative riddles. She discusses the historical significance of the book and its initial reception, and in a new preface discusses the latest scholarship on Dostoevsky and the novel that crowned his career.

V. S. Pritchett has written of Dostoevsky that he ""is still the master [because] he moves forward with us as the sense of our danger changes."" Nearly a century and a quarter have passed since Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel began to appear in installments in The Russian Herald. The essays in A New Word on ""The Brothers Karamazov"" show us that Dostoevsky does indeed continue to change with us, and that The Brothers Karamazov is very much a novel of our time. Edited by the nation's most respected senior Dostoevsky scholar, this collection brings together original work by notable writers of varying backgrounds and interests. While drawing on Dostoevsky's other fiction, Journalism, and correspondence, the writing of his contemporaries, and the state of Russian culture to illuminate the unfolding novel - these essays also make use of new fields of scholarship, such as cognitive psychology, as well as recent theoretical approaches and critical insights. The authors propose readings remarkable for their attentiveness to detail, relatively peripheral characters, and heretofore overlooked incidents, passages, or fragments of dialogue. Some contributors suggest readings so new that they subvert our usual modes of approaching this novel; all reflect the Immediacy of adventuresome, informed encounters with Dostoevsky's final novel. Treating The Brothers Karamazov in terms of a broad range of genres (poetry, narrative, parody, confession, detective fiction) and discourses (medical, scientific, sexual, Judicial, philosophical, and theological), these essays embody on a critical and analytic level a search for coherence, meaning, and harmony that continues to animate Dostoevsky's novel in our day.