Volume 1, Number 8 · December 12, 1963
Dostoevsky's Journalism
By Helen Muchnic
Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings
selected, translated, and introduced by David Magarshack
Random House, 334 pp., $6.95
This volume is a representative selection of Dostoevsky's journalistic work and of the letters of his last years. The book draws on three stages of his life: the early period, before his exile to Siberia, when in 1847, poor and neglected after an initial success, he wrote four essays for Petersburg News; the middle years, 1860 to 1865, when returning from imprisonment he plunged into journalism, first publishing his magazine Time, which was suppressed after three years, then Epoch, which failed; and the final years, 1873 to 1880, when after the novels that made him famous, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, he was at work on The Brothers Karamazov, which he knew would be his last. Most of these selections have not been hitherto translated and are not always easy to come by even in the original. Mr. Magarshack has rendered them in a way that gives an excellent idea of the colloquial, hard-hitting style of Dostoevsky the publicist; and he has explained in a brief introduction the circumstances under which each of the entries was composed.
Review, 1627 words
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