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“... narrator has brought with him ‘especially for the journey’ is the Diary of Anna Grigorevna, Dostoevsky’s second wife. After describing its appearance he gives an account of how it came into his possession, how he had its pages cut and bound, how his hands shook as he opened it for the first time. Then he asks himself why the acquisition of the book ...”

“... Dostoevsky in the 1840s, a caustic and iconoclastic rising star, was the subject of Joseph Frank’s first volume of biography and critique, The Seeds of Revolt. This volume stood out from many rival studies for the thoroughness of its research, the generosity of its approach (to Dostoevsky and to other critics), its intelligent judgment of Dostoevsky’s psychology and literary intentions, and, rarest quality of all in the Dostoevsky industry, for its sheer readability ...”

“... Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary is a huge grab-bag of a book, probably the least known of all his important works outside Russia – though in this regard his marvellous, semi-autobiographical prison-camp memoir, House of the Dead, runs it a close second. Read in the West only by professional Slavists and students of Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary allows us to see him at both his best and his worst ...”

“... the poles within which current critical thought in the Soviet Union are located. The first was the Dostoevsky Museum-Flat on the outskirts of Moscow, on Bozhedomka Street. This is located in the wing of a graceful Neoclassical building from the early 19th century, the building that became the Marinskaya Hospital for the Poor, where the novelist’s father ...”

“... and good old serfdom. No Russian writer was so sensitive to current feeling and opinion as Dostoevsky – as his first biographer Strakhov put it, ‘he felt thought with unusual liveliness’ – or more adept at creating works of art out of his response to them, and one of the best features of Joseph Frank’s five-volume study is the erudition with ...”

“... The mind is a scoundrel,’ Dostoevsky wrote in his notes for The Brothers Karamazov, ‘but stupidity is straight and honest.’ This wasn’t what he himself thought, or rather, it was only one of the things he thought. In the novel the line is given to Ivan Karamazov, who explains to his younger brother Alyosha that he began their conversation about religion ‘as stupidly as possible ...”

“... can imagine comparable tips about USPs being given to other writers of the past and present. (‘Fyodor Mikhailovich,’ Dostoevsky would have been told, ‘my advice to you is, stick to nutters – they’re what you do best.’) If Timothy Mo doesn’t have what one would exactly call a USP – lots of good writers ...”

“... even more pointless duel than Lensky’s and Onegin’s fatal dance; Pechorin kills Grushnitsky. Dostoevsky’s great passion for Pushkin seems odd – they are such different writers – until one considers that, literary nationalism aside, what he probably liked about Eugene Onegin was its utter absence of rational motive. There is no good reason for ...”

“... theatre, incomparable acting is confined very largely to productions of the classics – Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Ostrovsky – in studios or rehearsal rooms before restricted audiences. At the opera, the repertoire is (usually) sung well, though the sets were made thirty years ago. In avant-garde art, the main reference point remains Ilya Kabakov, whose ...”