At the turn of the twentieth century, Symbolist writers and thinkers at the forefront of Russian modernism cast Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy as their chosen ancestors—examples to be exalted, repudiated, and ultimately surpassed. Their writings transformed the way these novelists were read within and beyond the Russian Empire. But many of these seminal essays either have never been translated from Russian, or exist in unreliable translations that are now over a hundred years old. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism: A Reader opens this globally influential body of criticism to a new anglophone audience. The volume gathers fresh annotated translations of essays and readers will discover threads that extend toward writers from Sigmund Freud and J. M. Coetzee to Virginia Woolf and Mikhail Bakhtin. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism will appeal alike to students encountering Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels for the first time, and to scholars of literary history and theory. This volume fills a longstanding gap in the study of Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novels and provides English-speaking readers with a missing key to the absorbing—and ongoing—story of their reception.

Lindsay Ceballos is associate professor of Russian and East European Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. She is the author of the monograph Reading Faithfully: Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of Dostoevsky, 1881–1917 (NIU-Cornell University Press, 2025). 

D. Brian Kim is assistant professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of a range of articles on Russian literature and linguistic culture of the long nineteenth century and a translator of academic essays and contemporary poetry. 

Chloë Kitzinger is associate professor of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. She is the author of Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2021), in addition to articles on 19th–20th-century novels and novel theory.