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All posts tagged The Idiot

Summer reading

The exam season is more or less over, my marking marathon is finished, and one of the things I always look forward to at this time of year is being able to read intelligent books for fun. First up is my annual Dickens fix, and this time I’m reading Oliver Twist. This was the book […]

Dostoevsky and Holbein

I have a new publication, but unfortunately I fear that most of my readers will be as incapable of reading it as I am: ‘“Hakuchi” to Holbein “Hakano nakano Kirisuto”,’ Gendai Shiso, 38.4 (2010), 298-307. That’s ‘Holbein’s Christ inthe Tomb in The Idiot‘, translated by Kyohei Norimatsu (to whom many thanks) in a special Dostoevsky issue […]

Dostoevsky, the biography

I’m currently reading Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton University Press, 2010), the abridged version of his five-volume biography. So far so good; it preserves a lot of the best features of the original work, in particular the focus on Dostoevsky’s intellectual development and role of the intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Russian life. […]

Making and using concordances

I’ve been using digital concordances to analyse word frequency in literary texts for quite some time. While I was working on my PhD thesis, on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in the late nineties, I regularly used the Petrozavodsk State University on-line Dostoevsky concordance, as mentioned in a previous post. The site was pretty new at the time, […]