After an initial five or six weeks devoted to early works by Dostoevsky, we will embark upon an extended, slow reading and rereading of Преступление и наказание.  The goal of the course will be to give students a sense of familiarity with the novel as well as its scholarship and to impart confidence about the prospect of teaching the novel in the future.  Students will write a seminar paper and lead discussions about our reading. Eventual contributions by seminar participants to the existing scholarship on Преступление и наказание or on the shorter fiction will be an added bonus.

We will be using the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (30 vols) as our principal source, but any edition of Преступление и наказание should suffice for purchase. (If you can buy volumes 5 and 6 of the completed works alone, that would be ideal.) Students should try to purchase a copy of Boris Tikhomirov’s “Лазарь! Гряди вон,” a wonderful commentary to Dostoevsky’s novel.

Prerequisites:  Graduate standing or consent of instructor.