Volume 23, Number 18 · November 11, 1976
The Dostoevsky Labyrinth
By V.S. Pritchett
Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt
by Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press, 401 pp., $16.50
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
by Mikhail Bakhtin, translated by R. W. Rotsel
Ardis, 249 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Dostoevsky and His Devils
by Václav Cerny, translated by F. W. Galan, with an afterword by Josef Skvorecky
Ardis, 77 pp., $2.50 (paper)
When Dostoevsky was a cadet in the Academy of Engineers—the story runs—he designed a nearly perfect fortress, but forgot the windows and doors into and within the place. A guide to the novels: the reader is dropped into the novelist's claustrophobia, and it must be said that the enormous amount of Dostoevsky criticism since 1880 makes the walls thicker. The task of tunneling one's way out of his labyrinth is exhausting, and there is disappointment (if there is also relief) in discovering that, after all, the great artist was often, like Balzac and Dickens, also a journalist who skids into a phantasmagoria of the topical and au courant.
Review, 3070 words
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