How, in the first place, did a book such as the Diary come to be written by a novelist like Dostoevsky? We do not ordinarily think of him as a journalist, but quite the contrary, as someone perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the workings of his own psyche. (If this Boris Brasol is the same as the one mentioned in Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide, then he was a very sinister figure, implicated in the dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda in the United States.) The present volume, the first of two, is a more crisply up-to-date version, with a greatly expanded scholarly apparatus and a brilliant introduction (almost a small book) by Gary Saul Morson, who in 1981 published a remarkable study of the Diary, called The Boundaries of Genre. First translated as a whole in 1949 (by Boris Brasol), into an acceptable but somewhat stilted English, it has long been out of print.

To the consternation of many of his admirers, however, A Writer’s Diary also contains some of Dostoevsky’s most blatantly chauvinistic and anti-Semitic lucubrations, in which he gives free rein to his political passions and obsessions, for which reason it was not generally available in the ex-Soviet Union from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution until fairly recently. Its pages include in addition some of his shorter literary masterpieces such as ‘A Gentle Creature’ (‘Krotkaya’) and the ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (‘Son Smeshnogo Cheloveka’), which have often been reprinted independently. Dostoevsky’s Diary thus illuminates an entire stretch of Russian cultural history, and is indispensable on this score alone. It contains some of his most moving autobiographical pages, and records his contacts with, and reactions to, other Russian writers such as Nekrasov, Leskov, Belinsky and Tolstoy (not to mention a grateful obituary of George Sand, whose novels infiltrated subversive Utopian Socialist ideas into Russian culture during Dostoevsky’s youth and exercised an enormous influence). 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. 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.

Dostoevsky a writer in his time