The Cosmic Library On How Dostoevsky’s Fiction Surpassed Dostoevsky

The Cosmic Library explores monolithic books successful bid to research everything else. Here, books that tin look overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn retired to beryllium intensely accessible, offering truthful galore different ways to publication them and deliberation pinch them. Season 1 considered Finnegans Wake; successful play two, it was 1,001 Nights; play three, nan Hebrew Bible; play four, Journey to nan West; play five, nan American short story. Now, it’s The Brothers Karamazov.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts ideas into motion, and into affectional conflict, pinch combustible results. The convictions he expressed successful his nonfiction—religious convictions, for instance—join a operation that contains wildly different points of view, generating a book that encompasses much than nan non-fictional Dostoevsky did. In this 2nd section of The Cosmic Library’s five-episode Karamazov season, we’re reasoning astir really that works. More broadly, we’re reasoning astir really fabrication works.

“I’m, if not smarter, past astatine slightest much absorbing arsenic a fabrication writer,” says nan novelist Andrew Martin, “because ambiguity is truthful overmuch much imaginable successful fiction. You tin reason pinch yourself successful absorbing ways, and you tin not really cognize what you mean.” Of his ain fiction, Martin says that “the characters do things that are much absorbing than what I would explicate to beryllium my thesis astir our generation.”

This fabrication instrumentality still uses gears and parts from nan non-fictional world. For example: Dostoevsky, we study successful this episode, was inspired by nineteenth-century Russia’s assemblage strategy to create a fabrication encompassing aggregate views of nan truth. “The voices of nan assemblage mightiness supply replacement histories, let’s say, of what really happened,” says Katherine Bowers, a Dostoevsky scholar. Also, “the assemblage mightiness subvert nan truth,” she adds, aliases “the assemblage mightiness enactment arsenic a truth-finding agent.” All options are successful play, it seems, successful Dostoevsky’s novel.

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Guests for this play of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, writer of nan novel City connected Fire

Andrew Martin, writer of nan communicative collection Cool for America

Hearty White, big of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, writer of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian lit astatine Brandeis University and writer of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of nan Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian lit astatine nan University of British Columbia and writer of Writing Fear: Russian Literature and nan Gothic

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