Dostoevsky

Andre Gide once said that Feodor Dostoevsky "lost himself in the characters of his books and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again". In "Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst", Louis Breger approaches Dostoevsky psycho-analytically, not as a "patient" to be analyzed, but as a fellow psychoanalyst, someone whose life and fiction are intertwined in the process of literary self-exploration. Using Raskolnikov's dream of the suffering horse as a starting point, Breger goes on to offer a detailed analysis of the novel "Crime and Punishment", situating it at the pivotal point in Dostoevsky's life between the death of his first wife and his second marriage. With insights from his psychological training, Breger then explores other works by Dostoevsky, among them his early novel, "The Double", which Breger relates to the nervous breakdown that Dostoevsky suffered in his twenties, as well as "Notes from Undergraound", "The Possessed", "The Idiot", "The Brother Karamazov", and so forth. Additionally, details from Dostoevsky's own life - his compulsive gambling, his epilepsy, his philosophical, political, religious, and mystical beliefs, and the interpretations of them found in existing biographies are analyzed in detail.