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by Sarah Hudspith

In November 2015 I established a website entitled Dostoevsky Now. Billed as “a suite of resources for exploring Dostoevsky in the world today”, the site was intended for what the UK higher education sphere terms public engagement, in other words, a means of communicating with a non-academic audience. The site was hosted by my institution, the University of Leeds, and set-up costs were met by Leeds’s School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. It chiefly comprised a blog, with an associated Twitter account, as well as a page of links to groups, societies, museums and exhibitions, online reading groups and other events from around the world relating to Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky Now initially served as the main channel of communication about ‘Dostoevsky Day’, a public engagement event held at the University of Leeds on 19 February 2016 to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Crime and Punishment. This event, attended by staff, students and members of the public, featured a discussion with Oliver Ready, the translator of Penguin’s new edition of the novel; presentations by Leeds graduate students on engagements with Dostoevsky in the visual arts; an interview with the author R. N. Morris about his series of detective novels set in 19^th century St Petersburg; and a Dostoevsky-themed pub quiz. In the lead-up to ‘Dostoevsky Day’, I ran a reading group discussing Crime and Punishment and wrote some accompanying blog posts on Dostoevsky Now.

The mid-2010s was a time when the internet and social media were booming as platforms for academia to reach a wider audience, and at the same time there were a number of significant anniversaries of publications by Dostoevsky to commemorate. Dostoevsky Now briefly rode the crest of this wave; but as it launched around the same time as Bloggers Karamazov, I found it hard to develop an angle for the site that would be distinct from the excellent work being done across the Atlantic. As a solo contributor, I also struggled to devote the time that the site needed, and consequently it lapsed until the summer of 2021, when I devised a series of posts for the imminent bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth, on the theme ‘Reimagining Dostoevsky for the 21^st Century’. The first of these, ‘Dostoevsky the Master Builder’, grew out of a light-hearted Twitter conversation about Dostoevsky in Lego. In the second, I translated and adapted an imagined interview with Dostoevsky by the Swiss professor Ulrich Schmid, which used quotations from Dostoevsky’s works to suggest the writer’s perspective on contemporary issues. Finally, I interviewed Scottish academic George Pattison about his own blog serialising a story in which Dostoevsky appears in 21^st Century Glasgow, which has now been turned into a book called Conversations with Dostoevsky

My public engagement work on Dostoevsky continued with a number of radio appearances related to the bicentenary, which I was able to promote via the Dostoevsky Now blog and Twitter account. However, Russian’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought me up short. I felt deeply that I could not continue at that moment to work on and promote Dostoevsky, that it would take some time to conceptualize a new way of approaching him that would stand with integrity in the face of the horror being visited on Ukraine. That new way has since opened to me in the opportunity to compile a Companion to Dostoevsky for Routledge, which will feature many of the contributors to Bloggers Karamazov over the years. But at that point, I let Dostoevsky Now lapse for good.

The Dostoevsky Now domain name will shortly expire, and to preserve its content, Bloggers Karamazov editors have kindly offered to import my main blogs, backdated to their original post dates so that they sit in complementary context. The full joining of Dostoevsky Now to its big brother Bloggers Karamazov feels to me like the most natural, organic solution, and I am grateful to Chloe Papodopoulos and Katia Bowers for their enthusiasm to facilitate the move, as well as to the University of Leeds for releasing the content.

Dostoevsky Now on Bloggers Karamazov

Reimagining Dostoevsky for the 21^st Century (1): Dostoevsky the Master Builder

Reimagining Dostoevsky for the 21^st Century (2): Interviewing Dostoevsky

Reimagining Dostoevsky for the 21^st Century (3): Blogging About Dostoevsky, Part I

Reimagining Dostoevsky for the 21^st Century (3): Blogging About Dostoevsky, Part II

Thoughts on Part I of Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov’s responsibility

Catching the criminal: Thoughts on Raskolnikov and Porfiry Petrovich

Guest post. On rereading Crime and Punishment in the era of Making a Murderer

Sarah Hudspith is Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds, UK, and Secretary of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. She is the author of Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness: A New Perspective on Unity and Brotherhood (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) and co-editor with Vlad Strukov of Russian Culture in the Age of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2019). She is a member of the editorial board of the online journal Dostoevsky Studies, and regularly contributes to radio and TV on Dostoevsky and 19th-century Russian literature.