Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Dostoevsky

Rana Mitter reads from a new biography of Dostoevsky, 200 years after his birth.

Alex Christofi's biography is called Dostoevsky In Love. He joins academics Muireann Maguire and Claire Whitehead to look at links between the Russian author and crime writing.

From exile in Siberia to the novels which set a template - Rana Mitter and his guests Alex Christofi, Muireann Maguire, Claire Whiteheadand Viv Groskop look at the life and writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 – 27 January 1881). 

Crime and Punishment published in 1886 was the second novel following Dostoevsky's return from ten years of exile in Siberia. It examined ideas about rationality, morality and individualism which Dostoevsky also examined in Notes from the Underground in 1864 - sometimes called the first existentialist novel.  In his career he published 12 novels, four novellas, 16 short stories, and numerous other pieces of writing.  

Alex Christofi's new biography out at the end of January is called Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life 
Dr Muireann Maguire is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. She has published a collection of Russian 20th-century ghost stories, Red Spectres and Stalin's Ghosts: Gothic Themes in early Soviet literature and is working on a project called RusTRANS: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA              
Claire Whitehead is a Reader in Russian Literature at the University of St Andrews and has written The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860-1917: Deciphering Tales of Detection and is working on a project with an author illustrator https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~lostdetectives/ 
Viv Groskop is a comedian and writer whose 2018 book The Anna Karenina Fix is a bestseller in Russia

In the Free Thinking archives you can find conversations about 
Russia and Fear https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006fl6 
Soviet history featuring the authors Svetlana Alexievich and Stephen Kotkin https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09d3q93
Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker hears research into tourism in Chernobyl https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0775023
Cundill Prize winning historian Daniel Beer, Masha Gessen and Mary Dejevsky consider Totalitarianism and Punishment
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09h659t

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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