This chapter gives an overview of several different projects grounded in digital media approaches or digital humanities methodologies that I assign my students while we are reading Dostoevsky’s novels. In particular, Crime and Punishment is rich for this kind of approach. Projects include a digital mapping project using software like S…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the concept of the gothic corpse can be productively used to analyze Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) through the deployment of two specific imagined corpses in the novel: “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein the Younger and the murderer’s victim buried under the floorboards of Rogozhin’s house. The…[Read more]

This is the introduction to the volume, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity, published in 2021 by University of Toronto Press. Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer’s art – specifically the tension between experience and formal representation – as its central theme. While m…[Read more]

Ann Radcliffe’s novels were extremely popular in early nineteenth-century Russia. Publication of her work in Russian translation propelled the so-called gothic wave of 1800-10. Yet, many of the works Radcliffe was known for in Russia were not written by her; rather, they were works by others that were attributed to Radcliffe. This article t…[Read more]

This chapter presents a case study of the gothic novel reader and the way notions about gothic novels and their readers developed in Russia. The chapter takes a comparative approach, drawing on reviews and reader accounts from both England and Russia, to demonstrate how similar attitudes in both countries were despite Russia’s later gothic wave.…[Read more]

This article examines the epilogue of Dostoevskii’s novel Crime and Punishment from the perspective of genre and generic expectation. Considering two generic plots that appear in the novel, the detective plot and the redemption narrative, the author argues that the imagined reader’s generic expectation is both satisfied and thwarted in each cas…[Read more]