Kenneth Lantz - Böcker

One of the greatest writers of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is best known for such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. His works are widely read and studied today, and he has received much biographical and critical attention. Like many other writers of enduring literature, he engages timeless moral and theological issues. His writings and ideas are complex and reflect the swirling political and intellectual controversies of his time. This encyclopedia is a convenient and comprehensive guide to his life and writings.Through more than 200 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference details his life and career. Each of his fictional works is discussed, as are his major pieces of journalism. There are also entries for his family members, close friends and associates, places where he lived, literary movements with which he is associated, and journals or newspapers in which he published. Also included are entries for major writers and thinkers who influenced his works, and for ideas and themes that figure prominently in his writings. The entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of major works.

The essential entries from Dostoevsky's complete Diary, called his boldest experiment in literary form, are now available in this abridged edition; it is a uniquely encyclopedic forum of fictional and nonfictional genres. A Writer's Diary began as a column in a literary journal, but by 1876 Dostoevsky was able to bring it out as a complete monthly publication with himself as an editor, publisher, and sole contributor, suspending work on The Brothers Karamazov to do so.The Diary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame it incorporated an astonishing variety of material: short stories; humorous sketches; reports on sensational crimes; historical predictions; portraits of famous people; autobiographical pieces; and plans for stories, some of which were never written while others appeared later in the Diary itself. A range of authorial and narrative voices and stances and an elaborate scheme of allusions and cross-references preserve and present Dostoevsky's conception of his work as a literary whole. Selected from the two-volume set, this abridged edition of A Writer's Diary appears in a single paperback volume, along with a new condensed introduction by editor Gary Saul Morson.