Dostoevsky's A Writer's Diary is a huge grab-bag of a book, probably the least known of all his important works outside Russia - though in this regard his marvellous, semi-autobiographical prison-camp memoir, House of the Dead, runs it a close second. Read in the West only by professional Slavists and students of Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary allows us to see him at both his best and his worst. It contains some of his most moving autobiographical pages, and records his contacts with, and reactions to, other Russian writers such as Nekrasov, Leskov, Belinsky and Tolstoy (not to mention a grateful obituary of George Sand, whose novels infiltrated subversive Utopian Socialist ideas into Russian culture during Dostoevsky's youth and exercised an enormous influence). Dostoevsky's Diary thus illuminates an entire stretch of Russian cultural history, and is indispensable on this score alone. Its pages include in addition some of his shorter literary masterpieces such as 'A Gentle Creature' ('Krotkaya') and the 'Dream of a Ridiculous Man' ('Son Smeshnogo Cheloveka'), which have often been reprinted independently.

LRB 2 December 1993 | PDF Download