This is the first paperback edition of the complete collection of writings that has been called Dostoevsky's boldest experiment with literary form; it is a uniquely encyclopedic forum of fictional and nonfictional genres. A Writer's DiaryA 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 editor, publisher, and sole contributor, suspending work on The Brothers KaramazovThe Brothers Karamazov in order to do so.
The Diary'sDiary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame A Writer's DiaryA Writer's Diary was to combine 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 DiaryDiary 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.
Volume 2 contains a comprehensive index to both volumes.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
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