Overview

"Tapping into the emergence of scholarly comedy studies since the 2000s, this collection brings new perspectives to bear on the Dostoevskian light side. Funny Dostoevksy demonstrates how and why Dostoevsky is one of the most humorous 19th-century authors, even as he plumbs the depths of the human psyche and the darkest facets of European modernity. The authors go beyond the more traditional categories of humor, such as satire, parody, and the carnivalesque, to apply unique lenses to their readings of Dostoevsky. These include cinematic slapstick and the body in Crime and Punishment, the affective turn and hilarious (and deadly) impatience in Demons, and ontological jokes in Notes from Underground and The Idiot. The authors – (coincidentally?) all women, including some of the most established scholars in the field alongside up-and-comers – address gender and the marginalization of comedy, culminating in a chapter on Dostoevsky's ""funny and furious"" women, and explore the intersections of gender and humor in literary and culture studies. Funny Dostoevksy applies some of the latest findings on humor and laughter to his writing, while comparative chapters bring Dostoevsky's humor into conjunction with other popular works, such as Chaplin’s Modern Times and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. Written with a verve and wit that Dostoevsky would appreciate, this boldly original volume illuminates how humor and comedy in his works operate as vehicles of deconstruction, pleasure, play, and transcendence."

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Reviews

Who knew Dostoevsky was this funny? In this superb book, an A-list of scholars tackle the comic side of a writer too often filed on the dark side of the bookshelf. It’s all in the angle of vision; the lines between comic and sad, it turns out, can be quite blurry. These diverse, authoritative, and engaging essays reveal a multitude of hilarious goings-on in Dostoevsky’s works that readers, bedeviled with the accursed questions, might not have noticed. Laughter–verbal play, punning, jokes, slapstick, physical comedy, gestural excess–serves as a formidable weapon against the much-ballyhooed evil--murder, abuse, crime, misogyny, adultery, rebellion, and existential angst–at the center of his fiction. A criminal, it turns out, cannot stand being laughed at. Read this mind-expanding book. Then go back, reread the fiction, and meet a Dostoevsky you never knew existed. * Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Duke University, USA * This important collection is a landmark publication, placing at the forefront of Dostoevsky studies a hitherto marginal subject and rightly positioning Dostoevsky as a master of comedy. Theoretically adept, written with panache and engaging diverse cultural referents, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of world literature and culture. * Sarah Hudspith, Associate Professor in Russian, University of Leeds, UK * This all-female authored volume is a very timely intervention into the field of Dostoevsky studies, bringing the highly original and much needed perspective of humour into an area of scholarship usually characterized by philosophical and literary high-mindedness. Dostoevsky is well-known as a funny writer amongst Russians, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s important studies foreground the importance of ancient comedy as part of the genre memory of Dostoevsky’s novels, but in the English-speaking world the importance and philosophical depth of his ideas has up until this point obscured the humour that can be found throughout his oeuvre. This volume provides a comprehensive treatment of Dostoevsky and humour, from Emerson’s Bakhtinian intervention, through questions of humour in translation, physical comedy, comedy and the mind/body dichotomy, comedy and politics, comedy and philosophy, restorative parody, and comedy and gender. In the darkness of the contemporary moment, this reassessment of the Russian master’s comic voice is more necessary than ever. * Kate Holland, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, Canada, and President of the North American Dostoevsky Society *

Author Information

Lynn Ellen Patyk is Associate Professor of Russian at Dartmouth College, USA. Her first book, Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861–1881 (a Choice Outstanding Title for 2018) traced Russian literary culture's contribution to the emergence of revolutionary terrorism. Her second book, Dostoevsky's Provocateurs (forthcoming, 2023) argues that provocation is Dostoevsky's creative and communicative macrostrategy. She currently serves as associate editor of The Russian Review and has published articles and reviews on Dostoevsky, revolutionary terrorism, war, and provocation in The Russian Review, Slavic Review, Slavonic and East European Review, The American Historical Review, and the L.A. Review of Books. Irina Erman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of German and Russian Studies at The College of Charleston, USA. She has published articles on Dostoevsky, 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature and contemporary literature in The Russian Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, and the Russian Literature journal. Her chapter on Gogol and Dostoevsky is forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. Her article on A. K. Tolstoy won the inaugural Levin Article Prize for best article published in The Russian Review in 2020.

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