– THE RUSSIAN SOUL –

regarded as a single oeuvre, on a par with his novels, despite the somewhat piecemeal nature of its publication in monthly instalments over the course of what proved to be the last decade of his life. A Writer’s Diary was also Dostoevsky’s favourite work, but it has perennially remained in the shadow of his novels, in both its Russian and anglophone versions, despite the publication in 1994 of a comprehensive and authoritative English edition, from which all but one of the extracts anthologised here are drawn. One of the main reasons for the Diary’s relative obscurity is its sheer size: with a total number of pages equivalent to two of his novels put together, it is Dostoevsky’s longest literary work. Also slightly daunting is the oddity of its hybrid contents, whose genre – which could be portrayed as a quixotic, probing, perhaps quintessentially Russian take on the essay – Dostoevsky purposefully made hard to categorise. Dostoevsky’s position as a reactionary and ideologically problematic figure after the ­Revolution did not help. Despite the enormous popularity of A Writer’s Diary during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, it was only ever re-published once during the Soviet period, in 1929, just before Stalin’s Cultural Revolution began placing strictures on the arts. Remarkably, it was not until 2011 that the first properly annotated complete edition was published in Russia (densely printed on fifteen hundred pages).

In the West, scholarship on A Writer’s Diary was hampered for decades by an understandable reluctance x