Fedor Dostoevskii’s antipathy to the vulgar physiologism espoused by his radical opponents is well established, and expressed through characters from the underground man on. Yet critics have long accepted that such suspicions do not signify Dostoevskii’s rejection of science in all its dimensions: he was after all trained as an engineer. In this thought-provoking study, Melissa Frazier argues that the author instead embraced a different type of nineteenth-century science that “tells stories of minds and bodies functioning in the world as part of what Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment calls ‘the living process of life’” (6). Covering ground from the mutual interactions of bodies and minds within texts to the reader’s physical response to the text, Frazier constructs innovative comparative readings from a rich body of material, including Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What is to be Done?, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and, most notably and extensively, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Its broad range takes in a number of half-forgotten figures and theories that deserve a longer memory than they achieved. In particular, Frazier’s attention to the scientific and literary works of Eliot’s life partner George Henry Lewes is welcome in elucidating the significance of a popular scientific writer who was highly influential in Dostoevskii’s time but is little known today.

Chapter 1 illuminates the origins of the half-baked materialism of the Russian nihilists in the works of August Comte and Claude Bernard. The restoration of Ludwig Feuerbach’s “commitment to thought as only ever embodied” (8) fills in an important gap in the Dostoevskian jigsaw, but amidst the discussion of radicals’ scientific ideas and the book’s consistent emphasis on the embodied mind, it is surprising that no reference is made to Petr Lavrov’s “subjective method.” In Ch. 2 Frazier turns to the literary depiction of doctors and detectives, its focus less on the scientifically grounded deduction we might expect than on forms of intuitive guesswork that point to a different understanding of the mind’s relation to the world. The chapter could profitably be read alongside Claire Whitehead’s book The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection (Cambridge, 2018) for a more expansive view of the business of literary detection, in Russian fiction and beyond.

Chapter 3 brings Lewes’s physiological psychology to the foreground of an illuminating exploration of “sensation” that may send more than one reader back to nineteenth-century bestsellers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and The Trail of the Serpent. From the physical and mental effect of the reader’s encounter with the text, Ch. 4 reframes metaphor and allegory in terms of the material world’s interrelation with the mind, though the present reviewer remains unpersuaded that applying Charles Sanders Pierce’s concept of “indexicality” truly increases our understanding of, for example, the multiple meanings and layered identities of characters such as Prince Myshkin and Nastasʹia Filippovna in The Idiot, or the coexistence of the symbolic weight and material dimensions of St. Petersburg’s literary representations. Frazier’s allusive method that moves fluidly between texts and authors frequently serves her well, but here it threatens to overwhelm, as the connections she makes are not always easily discernible, and a resistance to clarity that occasionally obscures the book’s insights comes to the surface to the detriment of the argument. The connection of Ch. 5 to the whole is also slightly unclear, as although in the idea of fellowship the focus remains ostensibly on the fiction, the lens shifts away from science and towards the question of Dostoevskii’s and Eliot’s political views.

To be sure, Frazier does a good job of explaining the contradictions in Dostoevskii’s politics, and her confrontation in the concluding remarks of the chauvinistic aspects of his thinking that Vladimir Putin has adopted in the service of Russian aggression is more than welcome. But the lengthy digression in the preceding chapter on Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos and The Robbers seems misplaced, despite his undoubted importance for Dostoevskii, and does not have the impact of the earlier exposition of Feuerbach. And if fellowship is intended as the force that can retrieve Dostoevskii for those of us who loathe his imperialism and reject his antisemitism and other hateful views, then that needed to be articulated more consistently from the start of this worthwhile book.