The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. Today Fiona Bell sat down with Lynn Patyk and Irina Erman to discuss their co-edited volume, Funny Dostoevsky: New Perspectives on the Dostoevskian Light Side, which came out this month from Bloomsbury. FB: Do you remember the first time you laughed at Dostoevsky? What was the scene or line and—at the risk of committing the cardinal sin—can you explain why was it funny? LP: In college, at some point, I stumbled ..read more

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. For the 2025 MLA Annual Convention, scheduled to take place 9-12 January 2025 in New Orleans, the Dostoevsky Society is organizing a panel on the theme “Dostoevsky and Disability.” We welcome 250-word abstracts for papers that address the multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky’s work and bring them into conversation with the growing fields of Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities within Slav ..read more

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. This week Katya Jordan sat down with Anna Berman to talk about her new book, The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880, published by Oxford University Press in 2022 in the UK and 2023 in North America. KJ: First off, congratulations on your new book! Can you tell me why you chose to pursue the topic of the family novel? And what inspired you to examine not one novelistic tradition, but two?  AB: This is ..read more

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. Are you an undergraduate student who is interested in Dostoevsky and public writing?  The North American Dostoevsky Society invites blog posts from undergraduate students for our official blog, Bloggers Karamazov. Posts for this limited student series should focus on the topic of “Reading Dostoevsky Today.”  In light of recent calls for the re-assessment of 19th-century nationalism and imperialism in ..read more

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. This week our assistant editor sat down with Chloë Kitzinger to talk about her book, Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel published by Northwestern University Press in 2021. CP: My first question today is actually the very same one with which you began your book: What makes some characters seem to be so real? CK: I think that’s a question with many answers. But I’ll focus on the a ..read more

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our statement can be read here. For those attending this year’s Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference, which will take place between November 30 and December 3 in Philadelphia, please note the following panels and papers, which are related or adjacent to Dostoevsky Studies. The full program can be found here: https://www.aseees.org/convention/program. We hope to see you at ASEEES! Dostoevsky Pa ..read more

by Sarah Hudspith The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. This blog post has been developed out of a keynote lecture I gave at a Dostoevsky workshop at the University of Bristol in October 2022.[1] In the year and a half since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we have seen intense debate about the relationship between Russian culture and the imperialist politics of the Russian state, and correspondingly about how the academic field of Russian s ..read more

by Fiona Bell The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. Let me tell you a little bit about, as IDS President Carol Apollonio put it, “the Nagoya slice of the Dostoevsky chronotope.” I promise, no more Bakhtin jokes (in this report, at least—at the conference, my tally of overheard Bakhtin mentions came out to 11). The International Dostoevsky Society Symposium in Nagoya, Japan was slated for the 150th anniversary of Demons in 2021. Two years later, afte ..read more

by Lindsay Ceballos The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. Every spring for the last three years, I have taught a course called “Dostoevsky in a Global Context.” The idea behind the course initially was to introduce students to a major writer by focusing on his afterlives in a variety of cultural contexts. Students would encounter Dostoevsky’s art and ideas first and would then see how they resonate in another writer who worked consciously in his wak ..read more

by Peter Winsky The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. Is it fair to say that something strange is afoot in the works of Dostoevsky? The organizers and participants of “The Weird Russian 19th Century” Symposium surely think so. And the novelist himself would most likely agree. In fact, while speaking of the novel’s hero in the author’s note to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky remarks: Well, suppose you read the novel, and fail to see, and so do not ..read more