Introduction

Abstract

About three days before the publication, in Crime and Punishment, of the description of Raskolnikov’s murder of the old pawnbroker and her sister, the Russian papers carried a news item of a nearly identical murder. Dostoevsky was pleased at his own artistic foresight. By the end of his career it had become commonplace to describe Dostoevsky as a prophet, and the ‘prophetic’ description has never died. Twentieth-century critics habitually write of the ways in which he appears to have understood, or even forecast, our century as much as his own. Indeed, celebration of his genius in the West has sometimes taken on the character of a metaphysical rant, as if the dance of ideas in his work existed outside history. The prophetic claim is still in no danger of being understated. As with the philosopher Nietzsche, with whose name Dostoevsky’s has often been linked, it is not uncommon to read that it is ‘even now too early fully to understand what he had to tell us’ (Lord, 1970, p. xi); while C. M. Woodhouse tells us that those wishing to know how the world will feel in the year 2020 should read the maddest pages of The Devils (1951, p. 107). How does he know? And what does it mean to assert this? Dostoevsky is sometimes described as if he were a twentieth-century novelist manqué, born, by a freak of chance, too early: a strange compliment since it flatters us as much as it does him.