Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment

Acknowledgments

ix The very first attempts at this book’s arguments date back to my dissertation years at the University of California, Davis. Not much has endured from that dissertation chapter except my gratitude to Catherine Robson, David Simpson, and especially to Harriet Murav, who first introduced me to how one thinks and writes about Dostoevsky in English. The 2002 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar “Punishment, Politics, and Culture,” directed by Austin Sarat, also helped me formulate some ideas for this book. I am very grateful to Mike Levine at Northwestern University Press and to the series editors for their confidence in the project, as well as to the anonymous readers for their comments and criticisms. This feedback has been invaluable in helping me improve the manuscript. My thanks also go to my copy editor, Susan Allan, for her careful reading of the book and extremely helpful editorial advice, and to Heather Antti, Anne E. Gendler, and Sara Dreyfuss for patiently seeing the book through to publication. Those working in small colleges know how much we depend on the assistance of Interlibrary Loan Departments. This book would have been impossible without the patient and able help of Linda Madden of ILL at Keene State College. I also want to express my deep gratitude to the staff of the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, especially to Helen Sullivan, Joe Lenkart, and Jan Adamczyk for their expertise and collegiality. They have often helped me when a trip to Russia seemed like the only option left. I am also grateful to the staff of the now closed Slavic and Baltic division of the New York Public Library and to the staff of the Institute of Russian Literature and the staff of the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. Much of the present research was funded by several summer grants from Keene State College. A summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2007 also contributed to my writing of this book. Although that grant funded primarily a project on Tolstoy, this book, due to a similar focus, also benefited from the research I did with its help. Acknowledgments x I would like to thank Ronald LeBlanc for directing me to several crucial references and for helping me with some translations into English, as well as for his invitation to the University of New Hampshire with a talk on this book’s themes. And I am grateful to John Kekes for suggesting the book’s title. Ksenia Kaladiouk, Sofia Kravets, and Irina Patkanian have supported and encouraged me as only they know how. Above all, I am grateful to Leo Zaibert, my best and most generous reader and interlocutor. The keenness and agility of his mind and his ability to cut through the clutter of words and thoughts, my own and those of others, have been my model and my inspiration. I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents Nina Schur and Roman Schulkin. ...