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This course offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of the fiction of the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Students will read “Notes From the Underground,” his groundbreaking early novella, as well as three of his great, long-form novels: “Crime and Punishment,” “Demons,” and “Brothers Karamazov.” The theorist Mikhail Bakhtin characterized Dostoevsky’s experimental novels as “polyphonic,” in that the author let his characters speak as a discordant chorus of distinctive voices, rather than himself speaking in an authoritative, “monologic,” authorial voice. Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels gave profound expression to diverse contemporary ideas about politics, philosophy, religion, and human nature, in spite of the author’s own vehemently nationalist, imperialist, and xenophobic views.