Once I began reading the main sources, beginning with Gary Saul Morson’s 1981 monograph, and realized what a fundamental and innovative work it is, I became riveted. I certainly did not realize quite how interesting I would find the Writer’s Diary until I came to spend a month researching and writing about it. But I had little sense of the Diary as a whole. More recently I studied the entries in which Dostoevsky reviews Anna Karenina when writing my biography of Tolstoy, and came to recall them again when later translating the last part of the novel. I once taught “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” on a survey of 19th-century Russian literature course, and naturally knew the Pushkin speech. Delia Da Sousa Correa, Oxford: Legenda, 2006, 167-77). I should add that I am obviously speaking for myself here-I have written on Tolstoy and Chekhov, but only once on Dostoevsky (“Fugue or Music Drama? Symmetry, Counterpoint and Leitmotif in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,” Phrase and Subject: Studies in Music and Literature, ed. Partly because it is so long, and partly because even Dostoevsky scholars have begun to focus attention on it only relatively recently, it is still quite an obscure work even for many Russian literature specialists when compared to the major novels. The longer answer to your question is that I’d been intrigued by A Writer’s Diary for a long while without ever knowing it very well. We decided to define the unusual genre of A Writer’s Diary as a “quixotic, probing, perhaps quintessentially Russian take on the essay.” The Dostoevsky volume was commissioned as part of the “Classic Collection” launched in 2014, featuring essayists of the past (such as Woolf, Hazlitt, Wilde, Montaigne, and Nietzsche), with an introduction by a contemporary writer.
I was keen for one of them to be devoted to Russian literature. Thirdly, Notting Hill Editions, an independent British publisher founded in 2011 to revive the art of the essay, produces beautiful and original books. Apart from the difficulties in classifying A Writer’s Diary, it is rare to find it on the shelf in a bookshop due to its extreme length, but it deserves to be better known. Secondly, I was attracted to the challenge of helping to bring a less well-known but extremely important part of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre to a general readership. Firstly, I was excited to have an opportunity to explore a work with which I was relatively unfamiliar. RB: The short answer is only recently: when I was invited by Notting Hill Editions to write an introduction to extracts of the Diary they wished to publish alongside “Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” Even though I was heavily committed with other quite different projects, I knew immediately I would say yes.
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