HeyJaredThe Dostoevsky Reading Room
This publication follows my effort to read Dostoevsky’s works in the original Russian. I focus on the historical context that shaped his writing and outlook.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 27, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 22, 2026
Latest issues
The Artist and the Prophet: The Friendship of Ilya Repin and Lev Tolstoy (opens the original)
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The first installment of this series can be found here: Part I: 1880-1887“But he [Tolstoy] is the kindest of souls, the most considerate of men and a true aristocrat in his manners and the distinctive elegance of his speech. How fluently and gracefully he speaks foreign languages! How attentive, generous and unaffected he is in his dealings with everyone! And how much life, how much passion there is in this recluse! Never in my life have I met anyone whos
The Unwritten Novels Behind Dostoevsky’s Demons (opens the original)
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In May 1869, just three months after the final chapters of The Idiot were published in the journal Russky Vestnik, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote a letter to his longtime friend and literary confidant, the poet Apollon Maikov, exclaiming “I have one literary idea … before which my entire previous literary career was only rubbish and an introduction, and to which I am devoting my entire future life.”1That book, which Dostoevsky had initially asked Maikov to keep secret, was to be called Atheism. He had
“Better to Err in Mercy Than in Punishment”: Dostoevsky on Free Will and the Kornilova Trial (opens the original)
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On October 15, 1876, a St. Petersburg court sentenced a young woman named Ekaterina Kornilova to two years and eight months of hard labor, followed by permanent exile in Siberia. Kornilova, who was pregnant at the time of the crime, was found guilty of throwing her six-year-old stepdaughter from a fourth-story window. Miraculously, the girl survived.The Kornilova case attracted considerable attention in St. Petersburg and was followed closely in newspapers. Fyodor Dostoevsky, who at this time wa
“A Perfectly Beautiful Human”: How Dostoevsky Created Prince Myshkin (opens the original)
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In December 1867, with less than a month to submit the first five chapters of his new novel, The Idiot, to the Russian Messenger (Русский вестник) for serial publication, Fyodor Dostoevsky decided to throw out what he had written and start over. The following month, after successfully meeting his deadline, he explained to his niece in a letter that “I had to reject it, because I had ceased to like it… I destroyed much of what I had written.”<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-1" id="footn
Dostoevsky's Early Dreamers: The Landlady and White Nights (opens the original)
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“My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?”1So ends Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, a story that, nearly 180 years after its publication, has become a social media sensation. The book’s resurgence in the age of social media is, to be sure, fitting; Dostoevsky’s character is a dreamer, an individual who has transformed his own isolation into an elaborate story of his own existence, inventing relationships with strangers and substituting
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