Lindsay Ceballos’ Reading Faithfully is a study of the formation of cultural memory of Fedor Dostoevskii as a person and a writer, from shortly after his death in 1881 to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Ceballos focusses on representatives of the Silver Age who sought to embrace Dostoevskii’s alleged duplicity and insincerity, traits that became a hermeneutic conundrum following the publication of A Writer’s Diary, which brought him an idiosyncratic fame in the late 1870s. According to Ceballos, this “bifurcation of [Dostoevsky’s] literary activity into [two] separate categories—[his celebrated novels and his Diary]—began the moment [his] obituaries … appeared” in the press (2).

Ceballos’s theoretical apparatus is largely informed by the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rita Felski, but she coins her own term, “faithful reading,” evidence of which she finds in the early modernists’ engagement with the opinions, beliefs, ideals, and even psyches of both Dostoevskiis. “It was the inability to find a single Dostoevsky that helped faithful reading come into existence” (6). Where Sedgwick proposes “love” as a potent ingredient of “reparative reading,” Ceballos replaces it with “faith.” The latter undoubtedly facilitates attributing one’s own thoughts or aspirations—such as the assumption of seemingly “warranted connections that Ukrainian intellectuals have made between Dostoevsky’s writings and the deeds of the current Russian state” (13)—to figures who might not, in fact, share them.

Reading Faithfully consists of an Introduction, five chapters, and an Epilogue. Chapter 1 describes the theatrical remakes/adaptations of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in the 1890s, which Ceballos treats as forms of criticism and destabilization. Chapter 2 describes Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s and Vasilii Rozanov’s debate about Dostoevskii’s identity as a religious prophet. Chapter 3 focuses on Silver Age philosophers and their reading of Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion as an attack on his creator, the author. “[Sergei] Bulgakov and others reinterpreted the hero through the lens of their idealist worldview, which upheld the fundamental value of personhood as the arbiter of moral consciousness” (75). Chapter 4 portrays the literary climate following the 1905 revolution. Ceballos describes it as “the most divisive era of Russian criticism on Dostoevsky up to that point” (98). “Even the sequence of jubilee publication of Dostoevsky’s collected works in fourteen volumes (1904–06) seem[ed] to have been coordinated with current [political] events. The first volume to come out was the fourteenth, containing the popular Brothers Karamazov … while the controversial novel Devils came out in the revolutionary year of 1905” (101). To the dismay of Dostoevskii’s widow, most literary critics were unavailable to write an introduction for that edition, being outraged by the behavior of the Russian autocracy and seeing Dostoevskii as its zealous supporter and an antirevolutionary writer in general. Dostoevskii’s Diary and his later novels were scrutinized by many detractors (such as Andrei Belyi), “demanding an ‘overcoming’ of [Dostoevsky, as] the author” (111). Chapter 5 analyzes the Moscow Art Theater’s adaptations of Devils in 1910–14. As Ceballos shows, although the first version was named Nikolay Stavrogin, its playwright and director, Vladimir Nemirovich-Dancheko, aimed to suppress Dostoevskii’s “reactionary” views and concentrate on Ivan Shatov’s theory of the god-bearing nation. Nemirovich carefully studied Dostoevskii’s drafts and supplementary materials, published in the jubilee edition, seeing those texts “as entirely malleable things, open rather than closed for the future” (128). Nemirovich’s treatment of Dostoevskii’s texts is the most convincing example of “faithful” or restorative reading of a masterpiece.

I see only one drawback in Ceballos’s and her subjects’ approach to Dostoevskii: they somehow deny creative people their natural yearning for development, for trying new ideas or new ways of expression, and for taking paths that seem to be leading nowhere to people who surround them or interpret new stages of their development. Personally, I would rather agree with Saul Morson’s description of A Writer’s Diary as Dostoevskii’s “most brilliant and intriguing failure” than postulate its author’s duplicity and double-facedness (“Introductory Study,” A Writer’s Diary, trans. by Kenneth Lanz, 1994, 5). In the 1880s, Lev Tolstoi made a similar attempt to change his writing style and the format of his contributions when he started to write for Vladimir Chertkov’s Intermediary. Both Tolstoi and Dostoevskii felt the urge to address their readers, critics, and interlocutors directly, not solely through their literary characters. They were, in this sense, ardent bloggers avant la lettre.

Dostoevsky is nowadays the most widely read writer in Russia with his Diary and The Brothers Karamazov being by far his most popular works. My guess is that the Silver Age representatives had yet to live through wars and revolutions and their “faithful readings” of Dostoevskii were yet to be corrected by/adjusted to the social and cultural upheavals and years of living in exile that followed. Nemirovich’s adaptations of Devils on the eve of WWI seem to convey his visions of the days to come. In exile, Merezhkovskii found his new idols in Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Anna Akhmatova remained a faithful reader of Dostoevsky until her death in 1966. Reading Faithfully is an outstanding book, full of subtle and insightful interpretations and simply new cultural information that will be appreciated not only by students of Dostoevskii and Russian modernism, but by everyone who needs a beautifully written academic work to sharpen their own writing skills and appreciate the flow of scholarly information.