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Today Yuri Corrigan sat down with Michael Marsh-Soloway to discuss his book, The Mathematical Mind of F.M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity, which came out with Bloomsbury earlier this year.
YC: Your book reads Dostoevsky’s novels through the lens of his scientific and mathematical training. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to this topic? Do you have this in common with Dostoevsky, a background in mathematics?
MMS: I’ve always been drawn to the space between numbers and narratives. In my undergraduate studies at Northwestern, I started out in math and the social sciences, then pivoted to Slavic studies and history, with a minor in business, following my deeper interest in exploring how abstract reasoning and human experience could inform one another. I enjoyed participating in campus initiatives that encouraged students to see technical and humanistic inquiry as mutually sustaining frameworks. Later, in graduate school at UVA, I had the privilege of studying the history of mathematics with Karen Parshall, who became an inspirational mentor in assessing the intellectual context of the education that Dostoevsky received at the Main Engineering School from 1837-1843.
These experiences helped shape my interest in bridging what C. P. Snow famously called the “two cultures.” The tension between the arts and sciences, language and mathematics, always felt like an arbitrary distinction. I wanted to pursue natural philosophy as the great polymaths of classical antiquity experienced it, where all disciplines were equally relevant and interconnected. There is no single path to truth, and academics owe future generations of students the freedom to explore and experiment without the pretensions of disciplinary imperialism.
My favorite childhood book, Norton Juster’s 1961 The Phantom Tollbooth serves as a reminder of the need to focus on synergies as opposed to relativistic hierarchies of difference. I found inspiration in the figure of Milo, who dares to traverse the fantastical Kingdom of Knowledge, separated by the warring capital cities of Digitopolis and Dictionopolis, bringing peace by beseeching the exiled Princesses of Reason and Rhyme to settle their affairs. The story provides a perfect metaphor for how I see the humanities and the sciences — not as rival realms, but as estranged siblings, waiting to be reconciled through dialogue and imaginative synthesis.
YC: How extensive was Dostoevsky’s training in math and science?
MMS: The canonical biographies of Dostoevsky tend to skip over the subject matter of his formal education. After his arrest, moreover, many of his textbooks and journals were confiscated by the Russian Secret Police. To address the gap in primary source material from the period of Dostoevsky’s education, my book reconstructs the curriculum of the Main Engineering School in Petersburg, which was broad, rigorous, and intensive. Modeled on the École Polytechnique in France, the school cultivated new generations of soldier-engineers, trained in the latest applied sciences and technologies to assume positions of leadership in military and civil service. The school offered a three-year junior program with foundational courses in mathematics, languages, humanities, and Russian Orthodoxy, followed by a two-year senior officer-engineering track with curricular concentrations in applied arenas of military science, including fortifications with respect to redoubts, ramparts, and trenches, ballistics, hydraulics, and cartography. During Dostoevsky’s enrollment from 1837-1843, the expansion of the railroad system was a top priority for the state. Dostoevsky contributed to this mission in his schooling and career, planning tunnels, bridges, stations, and supply lines.
At the conclusion of his junior coursework, Dostoevsky pursued his specialization in drafting and blueprinting for advanced technical drawing and design. Beyond his ruler, compass, and protractor, he would work extensively with geodetic instrumentation and collaborate with surveyors to develop topographical maps at scale with special indices for elevation, borders, and flood zones. He would have regularly deployed knowledge of classical mathematics and general mechanics to formulate projections related to pressure, flow, load, elasticity, and stress limits. His drafting plans and blueprints for railroads, forts, and artillery installations, developed with methodical calculations derived from geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and differential calculus would have been instrumental to guide foremen and their teams of conscript-laborers on state projects.
YC: How does taking Dostoevsky’s mathematical interests more seriously help us understand his novels?
MMS: First, it allows us to see how mathematical concepts function not simply as metaphors or ornament, but as structural and philosophical tools in his narratives. For example, the notions of infinity, imaginary numbers, and non-Euclidian geometry can be applied to moral space, free will and determinism, human knowledge and its limits. While the field of mathematics offers significant applications to help civilization navigate and make sense of the physical world, there are still limitations that prohibit its descriptive abilities to explain and predict everything.
Second, this kind of reading helps explain the tensions in his work between rationality and irrationality, system and chaos, entropy and order. Mathematical systems are often thought to be the epitome of order; when Dostoevsky invokes them, or their limits, he is often interrogating the very idea of human knowledge, or constructing moral cases that exceed any purely rational calculus. For example, when he asks whether murder might ever be justifiable, in the model of utilitarian calculus, killing the pawnbroker is not only justified, but categorically demanded of the individual to bring about improvement to the lives of those she has harmed. In the mathematical framework of utilitarian calculus, this kind of addition by subtraction would prompt Raskolnikov to commit the act that nearly every other moral code would deny.
Third, this mathematical reading engenders new questions. What happens to narrative when two parallel lines intersect? What can be said of entities that are imaginary, invisible, or digital, that are not real in the ordinary sense of the word, but still fundamentally must exist and play a role in the shaping of actual events? These are reading strategies that extend our understanding of his characters, his narrative architecture, his thematic concerns. Finally, by putting mathematical and scientific registers on the table, we gain a deeper and richer appreciation for the intellectual world Dostoevsky inhabited — one in which science, mathematics, political thought, theology, and literature remain constantly intertwined.
YC: Your book seeks to reorient literary scholars to engage more directly with the sciences. Why is this important?
MMS: Given the rise of specialized technical jargon, practitioners in the Humanities and STEM fields face a daunting communication problem. The specialized notation in a physics paper, for instance, with special characters and formatting produced with Wolfram Mathematica or other tools, seems just as inscrutable to a philologist as an original copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy would be to a general reader with no Italian. Literary scholarship often treats the sciences either as external context in the presentation of historical background or as disparate concentrations removed completely and inscrutably from the purview of the artist.What tends to be missed is how our literature has been shaped by scientific and mathematical thinking. Engaging directly with the sciences means acknowledging that literary texts may be responding to, repurposing, or interrogating scientific ideas as opposed to treating them as abstract allusion.
In a world where the boundaries between disciplines are increasingly porous, the rigidity of a strict humanities vs. sciences divide becomes less tenable. For literary scholars, engaging with the sciences opens new interpretive avenues, allowing the field to speak meaningfully to broader intellectual conversations. It invites the humanities to participate more fully in the “big questions” around rationality, complexity, cognition, and meaning. Moreover, when we do not engage seriously with the sciences, there is a risk of superficial appropriation—borrowing the language of science or mathematics without grasping its internal logic or limitations. Deeper engagement fosters intellectual integrity and richer interpretation. In short, bridging literary studies and sciences doesn’t mean diluting either; it means enriching both.
YC: Is there also a takeaway for scientists here, a manner in which reading Dostoevsky could help reorient our understanding of mathematics?
MMS: Yes — there are compelling takeaways for scientists, mathematicians or more broadly those in STEM. In 1921, Albert Einstein remarked to his biographer Alexander Moszkowski after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into the Photoelectric Effect, “If you ask in whom I am most interested at present, I must answer Dostoevsky—Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!”[1] Similarly, a research study conducted by analysts at Thomson Reuters in 2015 found that Dostoevsky is the most cited Russian author in the world’s scientific community with 7,800 references, followed by Tolstoy with 6,400, and Pushkin with 5,200. So, this begs the questions – what exactly did Einstein glean from Dostoevsky’s works, and why does the author resonate so palpably with STEM researchers and scholars?
The first takeaway is about the humility of mathematical systems. Dostoevsky’s approach to literature invites reflection on the limits of formal systems of reasoning. His explicit mathematical language, including intentional references to infinite series, geometry, and probability in relation to conceptions of human freedom, moral paradoxes, and metaphysical unknowns emphatically gestures to the boundaries of mathematics itself. In other words, literature can make visible what is often tacit in mathematical practice: the assumptions, metaphors, and the cognitive jumps from number to meaning. Secondly, reading Dostoevsky encourages scientists to consider the human, cultural, philosophical dimensions of their work – the way mathematical concepts may carry moral, existential, ethical implications beyond the scope of spreadsheets and graphs. For example, imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry can be more than just abstract systems. They can serve as metaphors for alternative worldviews, moral compasses, and ontological statuses underlying the function and fabric of life in toto.
Third, for scientists and mathematicians, literature can function as a mirror: it asks, “What does it mean to formalize? To generalize? To approach the infinite? To divide by zero? And how does conjecture on these topics come to affect our ability to make sense of life and its manifold mysteries?” It is not by accident, for instance, that mathematics borrows instrumentally from philosophy in the designation of rational and irrational numbers. Similarly, there are certain numbers like p, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and e, the base of the natural logarithm, that defy algebraic notation, thereby warranting the special nomenclature of transcendental numbers.
This sort of inspection also yields fascinating associations when you start to compare the designation of mathematical terms across different natural languages and cultural contexts. For example, in Russian, there is a special connection between the mathematical term, “voobrazhaemoe chislo” (imaginary number) and the root, “-obraz,” or image, when considered especially in reference to the Orthodox tradition of iconography, which typically implies the “image of God.”While working at the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences, Leonhard Euler formulated his identity, eiπ + 1 = 0, and became convinced that his research provided incontrovertible proof of God and divinity. Richard Feynman would call the “crown jewel” of theoretical mathematics and physics, linking the curious realms of transcendental numbers, imaginary numbers, discrete numbers, and zero. Ultimately, by reading Dostoevsky, scientists may deepen their awareness of why they do what they do—and not just how—thereby reaffirming that mathematics is not just a technical tool, but part of a broader human project of meaning, knowledge, limitation, and wonder.
YC: Do you have a favorite chapter? Or a moment in the conception process that stands out in your memory?
MMS: I most enjoyed composing Chapter Four, on Dostoevsky’s gambling habits, and specifically his fascination with roulette, which paradoxically embodies his self-destructive inclination to unpredictability and entropy. His behavior in the casino towns of the Rhine River during this tumultuous period of his life, which included his having to pawn his wife’s engagement ring to repay his gambling debts, would ordinarily not compute for most rational players, let alone someone with knowledge of statistical probability. In mathematics, following Cardano’s Law of Large Numbers, the odds in any casino are always stacked against the gambler. The longer one plays games of chance, the more likely one is to experience the disadvantage that over time always favors the house.
The narrative structure of The Gambler, moreover, comes to function itself like a round of roulette. The focus shifts haphazardly between a motley crew of foreigners, charlatans, and frauds, who chase the favor of the Mlle. Blanche, whose predilections and actions would seem to embody the volatile outcomes in a game of a roulette. Just as players of Dungeons and Dragons will roll a 20-sided die to determine outcomes, Dostoevsky seems to have established the plot of the novel by spinning the roulette wheel. The appearance of the rich grandmother, “La Baboulinka,” provides comic relief in the wild swings of fortune that arise from hitting on an improbable sequence of successive zeroes. For context, the probability of hitting on a sequence of three successive zeroes is 1 in 50,000, or .00002%. – highly improbable, but not impossible. Similarly, Dostoevsky calls deliberately on the Gambler’s Fallacy, whereby each spin embodies an independent event, and the notion or feeling that after a long stretch of black outcomes, for instance, a red one must be due, simply does not pass muster. The intertextual allusions to Stendahl’s The Red and the Black and Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”coincide with mathematical references, including Blaise Pascal’s Wager and Nicolaus Bernoulli’s St. Petersburg Paradox, exemplifying the productive resonance of combining the arts and the sciences in metaphysical frameworks.
[1] Cited by Alexander Moszkowski in Einstein the Searcher, tr. H.L. Brose, London, 1921, 185.
Dr. Michael Marsh-Soloway is Director of the Global Studio and Teaching Faculty in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Richmond. His work bridges digital humanities, Russian studies, and intercultural pedagogy, emphasizing design-based approaches to global learning and student creativity
Yuri Corrigan is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Boston University. He is the author of Chekhov’s Antidotes (forthcoming in 2026 with Stanford University Press) and Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Northwestern UP, 2017).