Dostoevsky's Russia

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course explores Russian history through the life and work of Fedor Dostoevsky. In his lifetime, the great Russian writer witnessed political reform and revolutionary agitation, terrorism and political assassination, occultism and scientific positivism, mass migration and urban growth, and all of these events informed Dostoevsky's novels, short stories, journalism, and his life more broadly. In this course, we shall read Dostoevsky and his contemporaries selectively and examine recent historical scholarship on 19th-century Russia. We shall focus specifically on intelligentsia debates, revolutionary circles, mass incarceration, political exile, mental illness, urban environments, and the sex trade. In short, this course explores the history of Dostoevsky's Russia.