First published 2018
Fyodor Dostoevsky sits at his writing desk, wrestling with the demons that drive his fiction. Through imagined journal entries, he reveals the torment behind his greatest works. The Russian master confronts his gambling addiction, his epilepsy, and his crushing debts while creating characters who mirror his own psychological struggles. Each page captures his fevered thoughts as he transforms personal anguish into literary art. The entries move between moments of creative breakthrough and periods of despair, showing how Dostoevsky channeled his suffering into novels that would define Russian literature. This fictional portrait reveals the man behind Raskolnikov and the Underground Man, exploring how an author's life becomes inseparable from his art.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, biographical-fiction, 19th-century, russian-literature
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Russia
Period: 19th Century, 20th Century
132 pages · Print on Demand (Hardcover) · Franklin Classics Trade Press
Content warnings: addiction, mental-illness