Dostoevsky at 200: The Russian Novel Between Tradition and Modernity
An online lecture by Professor Kate Holland
This talk will explore the literary legacy of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, whose bicentenary falls on November 11, 2021. Famed for his psychological insights, his examinations of faith and doubt, and the ideological dilemmas of his protagonists, Dostoevsky is also a chronicler of the dramatic social changes which took place in Russia following the Great Reforms of the 1860s. This talk examines one of Russia’s greatest novelists’ ambivalent views of Russian modernization, as expressed from Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov.
About the Speaker
Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto and President of the North American Dostoevsky Society. She is originally from the UK, got her BA at the University of Cambridge, and her PhD from Yale University, and has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 2009. She is the author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and Genre in the 1870s (Northwestern, 2013, paperback 2021), and the co-editor (with Katherine Bowers and Connor Doak) of A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (Academic Studies Press, 2018) and (with Katherine Bowers) Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity (U of Toronto Press, 2021). She is the recipient (with Katherine Bowers) of two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection grants for public outreach programs, one to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Crime and Punishment, and the other to mark Dostoevsky’s bicentennial year in 2021. She is also the recipient of a SSHRC Research Insight grant (with Katherine Bowers) for the Digital Humanities project, Digital Dostoevsky, a computational text analysis project on Dostoevsky’s novels.
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Image: Mikhail Chemiakin. Mikhail Cheniakin: New York: Moscow. Retrospective Exhibition 1972-1989. Ed. by Serge Sorokko. Torino, Italy: Stamperia Artistica Nazionale, 1989.