Another book on Fedor Dostoevskii's ethics, says the oversaturated reader. Indeed, for Slavists, the moral complexities of Russian literature may very well be the horn of plenty. Still, in Slavic literary criticism, a text's ethics is all too often analyzed independently of its aesthetics. It is all the more exciting to welcome a book that not simply establishes an intrinsic relationship between the writer's ethical and meta-literary preoccupations but also invites us to consider form as the source for generating ethical awareness in the reader. Greta Matzner-Gore's study might very well be the first to make the ethics of form in Dostoevskii explicitly and entirely the subject of its focus.

As Matzner-Gore announces at the onset, her aim is to take the exploration of Dostoevskii's narrative ethics “into three directions at once: deep into Dostoevsky's creative process, into the narrative structure of his finished works, and into the ethical questions they raise” (5). The book delivers even more than it promises: by the end, we certainly have a firmer understanding of how Dostoevskii's apprehensions about narrative structure translate to his readers’ ethical engagement with his works. What makes Matzner-Gore's findings especially compelling is that she productively triangulates the two poles of creation and consumption of the text with the difficult ethical quandaries in the text. As her study convincingly demonstrates, Dostoevskii's consideration of the kind of attention we pay one another as well as our ideas about closure—in other words, the ethical core of his works—seamlessly transfers into his narratological and the reader's interpretational concerns, investing both with ethical significance.

In each of the book's three chapters, Matzner-Gore takes on a particular feature of Dostoevskii's aesthetics and explicates its ethical charge against the text of one of the writer's last three novels. While she makes appreciable use of contemporary criticism on literary ethics, her argument that the transferability between the meta-literary, literary, and interpretational levels of literature has an ethical character reveals the extent to which her methodology rests on the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose model for human relationships replicates the structures and hierarchies inherent in literary texts. As Matzner-Gore investigates the ethics of suspense in Demons (1871), the ethical vagaries of narrative closure in The Adolescent (1875), and the ethical implications of the difference between major and minor characters in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), what comes forth is the flexibility of Bakhtin's theories as well as their applicability to the ethics of Dostoevskii's literary form in particular and narrative ethics in general.

In the first chapter, Matzner-Gore delineates the space of ethics in Demons by making use of Paul Griffiths’ contrast between curiositas, the activity of those who look possessively and in search of a spectacle, and studiositas, the way of looking that is compassionate and self-reflexive. In Demons, she argues, “nearly everyone wavers…between feeling a participatory compassion for and a ‘bystander's curiosity’ about other people's misfortunes” (35). Locating the source of the novel's violence in the characters’ objectifying curiosity, Dostoevskii instructs his readers to reflect on the type of attention that drives their own reading. This kind of ethical reflection, argues Matzner-Gore, is mirrored by Dostoevskii's attention to the ethics of narrative suspense.

The second chapter focuses on the correspondences between Dostoevskii's eschatological thought that directs Arkady's “quest for moral structure” (46) and narrative closure. In The Adolescent, Matzner-Gore suggests, Dostoevskii wants us to become conscious of the correlation between narrative structure and moral development. In her insightful reading, The Adolescent is more of a künstler- than a bildungsroman: its protagonist-narrator has to learn how to construct his life as a story that neither “leaves [its] audience without ethical or intellectual guidance” nor “resolve[s its] tensions too quickly and easily” (44). A similar balancing act must direct the creative task of the writer as well as the interpretative task of the reader.

If the first chapter of Matzner-Gore's book claims that the choice of what types of attention we afford to one another and literary characters is an ethical one, the third effectively determines that the distribution of attention among people in life and characters in a work of fiction similarly calls for responsibility. Matzner-Gore's case study here is The Brothers Karamazov, in which the amount of attention one receives becomes the moral axis along which the meta-literary and literary structures align. As Matzner-Gore puts it, “in literature as in life we must choose where to direct our focus,” and yet “Dostoevsky also emphasizes that such choices are ethically fraught” (74). Such characters as Ferapont, Rakitin, and, most dangerously, Smerdiakov are pushed to the margins by other characters but also by the author; this isolation, Matzner-Gore insists, “is what makes them such dangerous adversaries” (81). Dostoevskii's lesson for the reader is not that social or narrative exclusions can be avoided but that they call for ethical accountability.

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form is not a large book, yet it is a generous one. It speaks accessibly on a sophisticated subject; more importantly, Matzner-Gore's study allows us to experience not just a variety of ways in which Dostoevskii's aesthetics is interweaved with his ethics but also the rich possibilities the subject of narrative ethics contains for Slavic studies. Such-and-Such and the Ethics of Form will hardly become a series, but one can fantasize.