Question 1

What is A Diary of a Writer?

Accepted Answer

A Diary of a Writer (1873–1881) is a monthly journal that Dostoevsky wrote, edited, and published himself in the last decade of his life, with interruptions. Unlike a conventional literary journal, the Diary contains an extraordinary variety of material: political essays on contemporary Russian and European affairs; literary criticism and reminiscences; short stories and fictional sketches; accounts of personal encounters and observations; philosophical and religious reflections. The Diary gave Dostoevsky a direct channel to his readers without the mediation of editors, and he used it to expound his views on Russia, Europe, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, the Jewish question (on which he said things that are now rightly considered antisemitic), and the meaning of Christianity. The two short stories it contains — The Meek One (1876) and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) — are among the finest things he ever wrote.

Question 2

What is 'The Meek One' about?

Accepted Answer

The Meek One (1876) is a monologue by a pawnbroker who is sitting beside the body of his young wife, who has just thrown herself from the window. He is trying to work out what happened — why she killed herself, how he failed her, what the sequence of events was. The story is presented as his internal monologue before the arrival of the people who will take away the body. The pawnbroker is a man of considerable intelligence and considerable cruelty — not deliberate cruelty but the cruelty of excessive pride, of the need to dominate, of the inability to bend even slightly toward genuine intimacy. He thought he was educating his wife, bringing her to understand him; he did not understand that what she needed from him was not education but love. The story is told through his consciousness, which means that the reader can see what he cannot: the gap between his self-understanding and the reality of what happened.

Question 3

What is 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' about?

Accepted Answer

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) follows a narrator who has decided to kill himself — he has reached a state of complete indifference to everything, has concluded that nothing matters, and has the revolver ready. A small girl accosts him on the street, begging for help; he brushes her away. He goes home, falls asleep, and dreams: he is buried, then transported to a world exactly like earth but innocent — a paradise of people who have not been corrupted. He corrupts them (the story does not explain exactly how); the corruption spreads; eventually they drive him away. He wakes. He has not killed himself. He goes to find the little girl. The story is one of Dostoevsky's most direct expressions of his central philosophical and religious concerns: the question of whether innocence can survive contact with corruption, and the redemptive capacity of genuine love even in a person who has despised everything.

Question 4

What are Dostoevsky's political views in A Diary of a Writer?

Accepted Answer

A Diary of a Writer expresses Dostoevsky's mature political and religious views, which were complex, not easily categorized, and sometimes troubling. He was a Russian nationalist of a specific kind: he believed that Russia had a unique mission in world history, that the Russian people had preserved a kind of innate Christianity that the educated class had abandoned, and that the West was spiritually in decline. He was hostile to socialism and to European liberalism, which he saw as based on false premises about human nature. He was pessimistic about the prospects for the Russian nihilist movement. His views on the Jewish question are the most troubling aspect of the Diary: he wrote things that have rightly been called antisemitic, though the question of whether and to what extent he was antisemitic is genuinely complex and has been extensively debated. The Diary must be read knowing that it contains these views.

Question 5

What should I read after A Diary of a Writer?

Accepted Answer

The Meek One and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man are the essential starting points within the Diary. Notes from Underground (1864) is the essential companion — the narrator-type that both stories develop. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is the essential companion — being written simultaneously with the Diary's final issues, and containing the full philosophical development of what the Diary essays sketch. The Possessed (1872) is the essential companion — the political world the Diary engages with journalistically. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) is the essential predecessor in the Dostoevsky essayistic mode. The Eternal Husband (1870) is the essential companion in the shorter psychological fiction — the same precision as The Meek One.

A Diary of a Writer Reading Order

Complete A Diary of a Writer Book List

The Meek One

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man