A Writer’s Diary

Through most of the 1870s Dostoevsky ran a monthly magazine that he wrote entirely himself: court reporting, quarrels about Russia and Europe, fragments of Siberia, and occasionally a piece of fiction. “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” turned up in it first. Take it as evidence rather than instruction. The nationalism sits on the page undisguised, so does the hostility to Jews, and neither is far from the thinking that built the novels. His coverage of the Kroneberg beating trial shows what he could do with a real case.