Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self represents a new step in Dostoevskii scholarship, a significant new voice in the discussion of Fedor Dostoevskii's depiction of self. Here author Yuri Corrigan addresses what he calls “the foundational riddle of Dostoevsky's writing,” namely the writer's “simultaneous advocacy for and rejection of the notion of an individual self,” that is, the tension between the co-existing and yet contradictory concepts of self as a Christian “annihilation of the ‘I’” and as “the irreducible and inviolable nature of the individual personality” (3–4).

Corrigan considers Dostoevskii's works as “one extended text … a vast experimental canvas on which the problem of selfhood is continuously explored over the course of four decades” (7), rather than following the path of those scholars who consider Dostoevskii's writing of the 1840s to be a distinct corpus from the “mature” works that appeared after his return from Siberia in 1859. Considering Dostoevskii's body of work as a cohesive whole enables Corrigan to discern repeating patterns of images laden with meaning and trace their evolution across the writer's career. For example, Vasia's “pretend sleep” in “A Weak Heart,” where it represents “the unstable intersubjective self,” echoes in Maria Timofeevna's flight in Demons and later in Smerdiakov's feigned fit in Brothers Karamazov (23). Similarly, Corrigan's analysis of the conclusion of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” describes a landscape that evokes images that carry importance elsewhere in Dostoevskii's corpus: a shivering figure that carries with it a memory of The Double and a brightness that evokes “The Landlady” and foreshadows Brothers Karamazov (146). This productive web of interconnected images opens up all of Dostoevskii's works to fresh interpretation. Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self provides readers with strikingly new readings of The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and Brothers Karamazov in Chapters 4 through 7.

Corrigan's approach focuses on close interpretation of the literary text. He acknowledges the many critical perspectives that have been used to address Dostoevskii's works, but also observes that “the very richness of this interpretive tradition … blurs our understanding” of self in them (5). Corrigan's introduction lays the groundwork for his own approach, which has a clear foundation in Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and analysis of the intersubjective self, but goes considerably beyond Bakhtin in his nuanced analysis of self-consciousness, doubling, memory, and individual personality. Corrigan has read widely in Dostoevskii scholarship, as his extensive footnotes demonstrate, but it would be helpful for readers if he brought some of these names into the body of his text, signaling more clearly where his work draws on—and moves beyond—existing approaches.

While the volume covers Dostoevskii's full oeuvre, its discussion of Dostoevskii's works that have been relatively underrepresented in critical scholarship is particularly notable. Nearly every work on selfhood in Dostoevskii's body of work has considered the subject first and foremost through two novels, Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, but Corrigan deliberately engages with these two works only through their interrelation to other texts in order to “defamiliarize Dostoevsky's artistic journey” for his reader (10), treating them as touchstones rather than as solitary masterworks. So, for example, his first two chapters focus on reading the self in Dostoevskii's earlier works and the way the same depiction of self is developed in Crime and Punishment. The discussion of the Petersburg clerk, Vasia, and his friend Arkadii in the story “A Weak Heart” and their struggle to act as individuals in the beginning of Chapter 1 leads to an analysis of Raskol΄nikov's separation from Razumikhin and the murder in Crime and Punishment. Similarly, Chapter 2 addresses depictions of amnesia and memory in The Double, “The Landlady,” and Netochka Nezvanova, and their extension in Crime and Punishment. This method convincingly demonstrates the importance of Dostoevskii's early works in the genesis of his later ideas; indeed, as Corrigan asserts, Dostoevskii's depiction of selfhood cannot be fully understood without the context of the texts from the 1840s.

In his conclusion, Corrigan aptly refers to Dostoevskii's development of the idea of the self as a “journey,” a kind of training ground for facing, eventually, “what lies most deeply within, and beyond, the self” (143). In Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self he has eloquently accompanied Dostoevskii's reader on this journey, guiding and illuminating new paths for understanding.