Reading Dostoevsky

Terras' Reading Dostoevsky consists of seven essays dealing with Dostoevsky's work and an appendix about Dostoevsky in English translation. The first essay is about Dostoevsky's work prior to his 1849 arrest for sedition; this is followed by a very strong essay on psychology in Dostoevsky's work which pays particular (but by no means exclusive) attention to his work in the early-to-mid 1860s, and by one essay each on Dostoevsky's five long novels (Crime and Punishment, The Possessed/Demons/Devils, The Idiot, A Raw Youth/The Adolescent/An Accidental Family, and The Brothers Karamazov) written between 1866 and 1880. All of the essays are fairly well-written and are accessible to anyone who has casually read the long novels (on the other hand, I suppose that if you haven't read the long novels, with the possible exception of A Raw Youth, you'll probably be somewhat lost whenever something you haven't read comes up). Terras refrains from putting forth any especially daring theses, instead taking us through each work in a thorugh but very concise fashion and pointing out a number of subtleties that would tend to escape the casual reader. Each of the essays definitely enriched my understanding of Dostoevsky. However, I have to admit I expected a bit more than what Terras offered. Not including the appendix, bibliography, and index, the book only comes to about 140 pages, which is hardly enough to do justice to Dostoevsky; Terras uses each of those pages well, but when I came to the end I felt like there should still be more. Perhaps the editorial reviews overpraise the book somewhat--in particular, contrary to some of the reviews, Reading Dostoevsky neglects some of Dostoevsky's more noted works: Notes From Underground gets only a couple of pages' worth of attention, and I'm not sure The Gambler is even mentioned. That said, I definitely enjoyed Terras' book, and I certainly came away from it with a deeper understanding of Dostoevsky's long novels.

Very nicely done by Terras once again. A fresh look at most of Dostoevsky's material.