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Dostoevsky attached introductions to his most challenging narratives, including Notes from the House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, and “A Gentle Creature.” Despite his clever attempts to call his readers’ attention to these introductions, they have been neglected as an object of study for over 150 years. That oversight is rectified in First Words, the first systematic study of Dostoevsky’s introductions. Using Genette’s typology of prefaces and Bakhtin’s notion of multiple voices, Lewis Bagby reveals just how important Dostoevsky’s first words are to his fiction. Dostoevsky’s ruses, verbal winks, and backward glances indicate a lively and imaginative author at earnest play in the field of literary discourse.
Price: $109.00
Pages: 222
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Imprint: Academic Studies Press
Publication Date:
22 December 2015
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781618114822
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
"Students, teachers, and admirers of Dostoevsky’s novels, of whom there are many, will want to have Lewis Bagby’s book at hand or nearby. In this engaging and provocative study, Bagby offers the most extensive analysis to date of what he calls Dostoevsky’s ‘first words,’ the introductions that appear in many of Dostoevsky’s texts...With its hard look at a new, little understood, but absolutely crucial, area of Dostoevsky’s work, Bagby’s study is a useful guide to a significant body of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and is especially well written. Full of sure-handed, solid, refreshing critical analysis, this volume belongs in the top echelon of scholarship about Dostoevsky."
— Tatyana Novikov, University of Nebraska-Omaha, The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (Vol. 70, No. 2)
— Tatyana Novikov, University of Nebraska-Omaha, The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (Vol. 70, No. 2)
Lewis Bagby, Professor Emeritus of Russian, University of Wyoming, is the author of Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Russian Byronism and editor of A Hero of Our Times: Critical Articles. He has published widely on Russian Romanticism, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Bakhtin.
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Model Prefaces from Russian Literature
Chapter 2: Dostoevsky’s Initial Post-Siberian Work
Chapter 3: Playing with Authorial Identities
Chapter 4: Monsters Roam the Text
Chapter 5: Re-Contextualizing Introductions
Chapter 6: Anxious to the End
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index