The Female Characters of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is renowned throughout the world as a great psychological writer. His deep understanding of human behavior enabled him to create within his oeuvre some of the most memorable, credible characters -many of them female -in world literature. Unfortunately, Dostoevsky scholarship has tended to forget the women enlivening his myriad works, leaving them largely unobserved. The present study was undertaken in an effort to provide a unified examination of all of these women, with special regard to their similarities and their differences. Despite the prevailing opinion, which holds that they can be fit into tidy categories, Dostoevsky's women never cease to defy typology and stray from their assigned slots. Their allure for the reader is not part of some adherence to a predictable persona. Rather, it is their all-too-human irrational disobedience and unforeseeable autonomy which enlivens them and the books they inhabit. For it is in their breathing individuality that the reader finds the power and the reality of Dostoevsky's female characters; in their diverse forms and nuances shines the magic ore of Dostoevsky's genius, his "fantastic realism."