DostoevskyAndré GideOmniClassics · Literature
Dostoevsky
André GideOne novelist reads another with special attention to moral conflict, contradictory motives, and the construction of character.
Progress is saved in this browser
About the book
André Gide approaches Dostoevsky as a writer whose fictional people disturb simple accounts of personality and moral choice. Rather than offering only a chronological biography, he uses life, letters, and novels to investigate a distinctive imaginative practice. Characters may be divided against themselves, and an apparently decisive explanation can fail to contain their next action. That complexity interests Gide both ethically and artistically. The English volume includes Arnold Bennett's introduction, which supplies another contemporary critical perspective. Readers familiar with the novels will find arguments to test against them; newcomers should remember that critical discussion may reveal significant incidents. The book is valuable as a meeting of two literary minds, with Gide's own concerns shaping what he recognizes and emphasizes in the Russian novelist.
- Moral psychology
- Fictional character
- Writers reading writers
Why read it
For an engaged novelist's criticism that connects questions of form with the difficulty of understanding human motives.
English translation of André Gide's study · introduction by Arnold Bennett, 1926