The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s

Acknowledgments

vii This book would not have been possible without the help and support of people in four countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, and Canada. Parts of it were conceived at the University of Cambridge; it took shape at Yale University and was completed at the University of Toronto. At Yale, a Whiting Graduate Fellowship and a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship helped to provide much-needed writing time, while grants from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies helped to fund research trips to St. Petersburg. I am extremely grateful to Mike Levine and to Northwestern University Press for their enthusiastic support of this manuscript. I would like to begin by expressing warm thanks to Dr. Aileen Kelly, my undergraduate supervisor at King’s College, Cambridge, and the person responsible for my introduction to Dostoevsky. My deepest debt of gratitude is to Robert L. Jackson for his intellectual mentorship, comradeship, and friendship over the years. He led this project from its embryonic beginnings in my undergraduate thesis through its intermediate stage in my doctoral dissertation and beyond. He was the intellectual inspiration behind my migration to the New World, and for that, as well as for his limitless kindness and unwavering support, I thank him from the bottom of my heart. I am grateful to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University for being such a comforting home to me for so many years, first during graduate school and then for my first job. I would like to thank Katerina Clark, Irina Dolgova, Hilary Fink, Harvey Goldblatt, John Mackay,Tomas Venclova, and especially Vladimir Alexandrov for their stimulating conversation, company, and support during the decade I spent in New Haven. This book was completed after my move to the Slavic Department at the University of Toronto and has profited immensely from the wonderfully warm and welcoming environment of my new home department. I would like to thank Veronika Ambros , Christopher Barnes, Leonid Livak, Taras Koznarsky, Julia Mikhailova, Pia Paivio, Joseph Schallert, Maxim Tarnawsky, and Tamara Trojanowska for their collegiality and enthusiasm and for the rich intellectual exchange that takes place every day on the fourth floor of Alumni Hall. Especially warm Acknowledgments Acknowledgments viii thanks go to Christina Kramer and Donna Orwin for their support, mentorship , and friendship. My understanding and appreciation of Dostoevsky has become so much deeper and richer as a result of the brilliant insights and encouragement of the many undergraduates and graduate students I have had the immense pleasure to teach for the last ten years. Particular thanks go to Chloe Kitzinger and Keside Ugoji, two subtle and sophisticated readers of Dostoevsky, and to Olha Tytarenko, whose insights during the last three years have helped greatly as I have sought to structure my ideas. I have presented parts of this project at many conferences, colloquia, and symposia. Special thanks go to the Slavic Departments of Yale, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, New York University, and Toronto for inviting me to present my work and for the many helpful suggestions I received, many of which have been incorporated into this final version. I am grateful to Irina Paperno for invaluable help and advice with an earlier version of this project. Ilya Kliger and Lina Steiner have read chapter drafts and have cheerfully served as sounding boards for my ideas over the years. I am immensely grateful for that and for their friendship and collegiality. I would like to thank the manuscript readers at Northwestern University Press for their helpful suggestions and corrections. Some of the ideas in chapters 4 and 5 were originally presented in articles in the following publications, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge their permission for republication: “The Fictional Filter: ‘Krotkaia’ and The Diary of a Writer,” Dostoevsky Studies, n.s., 4 (2000): 95–116; “The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel” in A New Word on “The Brothers Karamazov,” ed. Robert Louis Jackson, 192–200 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004); and “Novelizing Religious Experience : The Generic Landscape of The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 63–81. This book could never have been written without the comradeship, loyalty, support, and affection of friends and colleagues all over the world. On the other side of the Atlantic, Jane Adshead, Rodie Akerman, Alice Fox, Frances Forsyth, and Rachel Smith have always found time in their busy schedules for an emergency phone call or a last-minute get-together. From my graduate...