Re-reading Dostoyevsky

A good book, and an unusual one for this list. Re-reading Dostoyevsky is a single-author monograph by Yuri Karyakin, issued to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Dostoyevsky's birth, and it is not committee prose. Across some 63,000 words the word "Soviet" appears twice, "Party" twice, "class" twice; "socialist realism" does not appear at all.

Its method is genetic criticism - reading a novel against its own discarded drafts - and it is done with real skill. Thirty-odd short chapters, each titled with a phrase lifted from the novel or from the working notebooks, centre almost entirely on Crime and Punishment and on the notes Dostoyevsky made for it. The finest sustained passage reconstructs why he abandoned three separate endings in turn: a suicide, a rescue from a fire followed by repentance, and an explicitly religious close. Karyakin's verdict on the rejection is the sentence a Marxist critic ought to be able to write and mostly cannot - that here is an excellent example of how an artist can win over his own preconceived notions.

He also does two things that took some nerve in 1971. He names Mikhail Bakhtin, then only recently recovered from decades of obscurity, and calls him a Soviet critic. And he takes on The Possessed directly rather than avoiding it, granting that Pyotr Verkhovensky was based on Nechayev and that Dostoyevsky was entitled to his target, before arguing about the reach of the indictment.

Karyakin belonged to the reform-communist intelligentsia, and in 1968 made a speech in Moscow that got him into serious party trouble. That fact is worth holding in mind through his closing pages on Dostoyevsky and the censor.

Translated by Sergei Chulaki. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.