First Words (ENG)

Lewis Bagby, Professor Emeritus of Russian, University of Wyoming, is the author of Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Russian Byronism and editor of A Hero of Our Times: Critical Articles. He has published widely on Russian Romanticism, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Bakhtin.

• Note on TransliterationAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Model Prefaces from Russian LiteratureChapter 2: Dostoevsky’s Initial Post-Siberian WorkChapter 3: Playing with Authorial IdentitiesChapter 4: Monsters Roam the TextChapter 5: Re-Contextualizing IntroductionsChapter 6: Anxious to the EndConclusionBibliographyIndex

"Students, teachers, and admirers of Dostoevsky’s novels, of whom there are many, will want to have Lewis Bagby’s book at hand or nearby. In this engaging and provocative study, Bagby offers the most extensive analysis to date of what he calls Dostoevsky’s ‘first words,’ the introductions that appear in many of Dostoevsky’s texts...With its hard look at a new, little understood, but absolutely crucial, area of Dostoevsky’s work, Bagby’s study is a useful guide to a significant body of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and is especially well written. Full of sure-handed, solid, refreshing critical analysis, this volume belongs in the top echelon of scholarship about Dostoevsky."