Themes in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writings
After his release from prison his writing style moved away from what Apollon Grigoryev called the "sentimental naturalism" of his earlier works and became more concerned with the dramatization of psychological and philosophical themes.
[5] According to Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky wanted "to introduce the extraordinary into the very thick of the commonplace, to fuse... the sublime with the grotesque, and push images and phenomena of everyday reality to the limits of the fantastic.
"[6] Grossman saw Dostoevsky as the inventor of an entirely new novelistic form, in which an artistic whole is created out of profoundly disparate genres—the religious text, the philosophical treatise, the newspaper, the anecdote, the parody, the street scene, the grotesque, the pamphlet—combined within the narrative structure of an adventure novel.
[9] For Mikhail Bakhtin, 'the idea' is central to Dostoevsky's poetics, and he called him the inventor of the polyphonic novel, in which multiple "idea-voices" co-exist and compete with each other on their own terms, without the mediation of a 'monologising' authorial voice.
According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky revived satire as a genre combining comedy, fantasy, symbolism, adventure, and drama in which mental attitudes are personified.
Other aspects of the genre can be found in Crime and Punishment, for example the dark and dirty rooms and Raskolnikov's Mephistophelian character, and in the descriptions of Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot and Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov.
Critics such as Donald Fanger[16] and Roman Katsman, writer of The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon, call these elements "mythopoeic".
The correspondence between them reveals Devushkin's tender, sentimental adoration for his relative and her confident, warm regard for him as they grapple with the bewildering and sometimes heartbreaking problems forced upon them by their lowly social positions.
It centres on the disintegrating inner and outer world of its shy and 'honourable' protagonist, Yakov Golyadkin, as he slowly discovers that his treacherous doppelgänger has achieved the social respect and success denied to him.
Belinsky commented that the work had "no sense, no content and no thoughts", and that the novel was boring due to the protagonist's garrulity, or tendency towards verbal diarrhoea.
[30] "White Nights" "features rich nature and music imagery, gentle irony, usually directed at the first-person narrator himself, and a warm pathos that is always ready to turn into self-parody".
Parallels have been made between his short story "An Honest Thief" and George Sand's François le champi and Eugène Sue's Mathilde ou Confessions d'une jeune fille, and between Dostoyevsky's Netochka Nezvanova and Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son.
"[31] After his release from prison, Dostoyevsky became more concerned with elucidating psychological and philosophical themes, and his writing style moved away from the kind of "sentimental naturalism" found in Poor Folk and The Insulted and Injured.
[32] Despite having spent four years in prison in horrendous conditions, he wrote two humorous books: the novella Uncle's Dream and the novel The Village of Stepanchikovo.
Later, he wrote about his reluctance to remove religious themes from the book, stating, "The censor pigs have passed everything where I scoffed at everything and, on the face of it, was sometimes even blasphemous, but have forbidden the parts where I demonstrated the need for belief in Christ from all this".
