Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Reading notes

• The Summer Girl §49 Dostoevsky

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom the husband confuses with Turgenev despite their starkly different styles -- a small joke about his total lack of real literary knowledge.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5 March 1889. Moscow. §9 I bought Dostoevsky

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (d. 1881); Chekhov refers here to a set of his works just purchased at Suvorin's bookshop, not to any personal acquaintance. Chekhov's assessment -- "good, but very long-winded and immodest" -- is characteristically terse and unimpressed.

• Neighbors §68 a strange marriage in the Dostoevsky vein

  "Во вкусе Достоевского" -- the narrator's own aside, comparing Vlasich's chivalrous-impulsive first marriage (recounted in section 65) to the kind of morally fevered, self-dramatizing decision a character in a Dostoevsky novel might make; used here with a touch of gentle irony rather than as straightforward praise.