The essential entries from Dostoevsky's complete Diary, called his boldest experiment in literary form, are now available in this abridged edition; it is a uniquely encyclopedic forum of fictional and nonfictional genres. A Writer's Diary began as a column in a literary journal, but by 1876 Dostoevsky was able to bring it out as a complete monthly publication with himself as an editor, publisher, and sole contributor, suspending work on The Brothers Karamazov to do so.
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The Diary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame it incorporated an astonishing variety of material: short stories; humorous sketches; reports on sensational crimes; historical predictions; portraits of famous people; autobiographical pieces; and plans for stories, some of which were never written while others appeared later in the Diary itself. A range of authorial and narrative voices and stances and an elaborate scheme of allusions and cross-references preserve and present Dostoevsky's conception of his work as a literary whole.
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Selected from the two-volume set, this abridged edition of A Writer's Diary appears in a single paperback volume, along with a new condensed introduction by editor Gary Saul Morson.
