{"id":35478,"date":"2026-01-16T15:11:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T20:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/2026\/01\/16\/aseees-2025-dostoevsky-in-the-digital-age\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T15:11:40","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T20:11:40","slug":"aseees-2025-dostoevsky-in-the-digital-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/aseees-2025-dostoevsky-in-the-digital-age\/","title":{"rendered":"ASEEES 2025: Dostoevsky in the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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by Fiona Bell<\/em><\/p>\n

Dostoevsky\u2019s relationship to revolution may be ambivalent<\/a>, but speakers and attendees at this year\u2019s NADS-sponsored ASEEES panel seemed to agree: he\u2019d have hated the AI revolution. A comforting thought, maybe, but it doesn\u2019t help much with a more important question: what are we going to do about it? How do these technological shifts affect our teaching and research, our communities, and, for crying out loud, our readings of Dostoevsky? \u00a0<\/p>\n

A continuation of a discussion begun at a roundtable on the \u201cDigital Dostoevsky\u201d computational text analysis project at last year\u2019s conference, this year\u2019s North American Dostoevsky Society panel featured the author\u2019s reception history on Wikipedia, a digital humanities methodology called stylometry, and meditations on language and humanity as theorized, respectively, by Dostoevsky and ChatGPT. Lynn Patyk offered generous discussant comments, asking panelists to reflect more on the \u201closs and promise\u201d of the digital age, how to navigate this \u201cm\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois<\/em> between author, human, and machine.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lindsay Ceballos charted the short history of the Russian and English Wikipedia pages devoted to the author. Reading the editing history of each page, along with the \u201ctalk\u201d fora, in which volunteer editors discuss revisions, she critiqued the \u201cpolyphonic\u201d quality of this site, whose author-editors are required to \u201cpursue a possibility of neutrality to an absurd degree.\u201d Ceballos paid particular attention to treatments of Dostoevsky\u2019s antisemitism, tracking when this section appeared and disappeared, and closely reading the language of censure and shrugging that reported on this aspect of the writer\u2019s politics. She concluded with a call to action: for scholars to make our best knowledge more publicly accessible through Wikipedia volunteerism. After all, she noted, large language models are sourcing information from Wikipedia. The least (or most?) we can do is make this site more reliable.<\/p>\n

Katherine Bowers, presenting on the work of herself and absent coauthor Kate Holland, reported on their use of stylometry to compare narrative voice across Dostoevsky\u2019s major novels. As \u201cformalism nerds,\u201d Holland and Bowers were interested in determining whether the stylistic deviation of the epilogue of Crime and Punishment <\/em>from the rest of the novel could be represented or explained through stylometry. This computational method compares the relative frequency of specific character sets to determine similarity: as Bowers noted, it was recently used in attempts to unmask Elena Ferrate. Stylometry, in Bowers\u2019s and Holland\u2019s presentation, seemed to be a tool less suited to answering questions, but extremely productive in generating new ones. For instance, their analysis of the epilogue actually suggested that Parts I and II of Crime and Punishment <\/em>differ significantly from Parts III-VI. Now, with more traditional reading techniques, we can determine why this might be. Bowers emphasized the defamiliarizing effect of stylometry on her and Holland\u2019s reading practices: \u201cThis makes us uncomfortable,\u201d she noted, but \u201cit exposes things we can study with different tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suddenly, \u201cthe Golyadkin Jr. of writing,\u201d as Chlo\u00eb Kitzinger put it, appeared before us: ChatGPT. If you read op-eds, you\u2019re familiar with the criticism that generative AI corrupts liberal notions of the human. The mark of humanity, these arguments go, is being an idiosyncratic individual, saying things in your own words, expressing and creating yourself simultaneously. ChatGPT robs students, in particular, of the opportunity to be and become themselves. In her paper, Kitzinger queried Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201csources of the self,\u201d particularly in Notes from Underground<\/em>, indicating how the writer departs from this brand of liberal humanism while also warning against an eerily disembodied positivist dystopia. Original language, Kitzinger argued, is not necessarily an indicator of humanity in Dostoevsky\u2019s world. The most ethical state, for him, may be silence. Yet, Kitzinger wondered how we might appreciate Dostoevsky\u2019s critique of positivism without endorsing his \u201ccoercive collectivism,\u201d one based on religious and national affinity. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Who does language belong to? This question has occupied our Bakhtin-inflected subfield for some time, priming Dostoevsky specialists to weigh in on artificial intelligence and language. At first glance, and with horror, we might ask: what\u2019s more polyphonic than a large language model? If Bakhtin praises Dostoevsky for dissolving into his characters, then why aren\u2019t we praising our students for boldly renouncing the bourgeois values of original authorship and intellectual property, academic honesty and honor codes, and dipping their cups in the sea of collective language? ChatGPT, I think, reveals the cracks in the Bakhtin industrial complex. The renunciation of individualism is not inherently good; what matters, of course, is the nature of the collective one enters. In Dostoevsky\u2019s case, it was Russian ethnonationalism. In the case of AI, what appears to be \u201cfree language\u201d is owned by corporations and sourced from the labor of others. Len von Morz\u00e9, writing for Radical Teacher<\/em><\/a>, likens ChatGPT to a blood bank in which the generated text takes a transfusion from the \u201cdonations\u201d (unwilling and unpaid) of thousands of flesh-and-blood writers from centuries past. Who \u201cgave blood\u201d so that we may generate text effortlessly today?<\/p>\n

Last year, Eric Naiman suggested<\/a> that Dostoevskyrequires \u201cabsolute individual responsibility\u201d to avoid complicity with another\u2019s evil. To use ChatGPT, he memorably concluded, is, for this reason, to burn Christ at the stake. To write po-Dostoevskomu<\/em>, then, is to write in your own words, Devil may care. Or better yet (on Kitzinger\u2019s reading) to write nothing at all. But Ceballos offers another way out: sometimes, writing is our best shot at redemptive forms of collectivity. Clearly, this panel is one of many conversations to come about artificial intelligence in our field. How fortunate that, rather than adopting a Dostoevskian brand of masochism\u2014why does such a technology live?\u2014the panelists modeled urgent, imaginative, and critical approaches to digital tools and the people who use them.<\/p>\n

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Fiona Bell\u00a0is an Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Utah and\u00a0a member of the North American Dostoevsky Society\u2019s\u00a0Readers Advisory Board<\/a>. Learn more about her work\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement\u00a0here. by Fiona Bell Dostoevsky\u2019s relationship to revolution may be ambivalent, but speakers and attendees at this year\u2019s NADS-sponsored ASEEES panel seemed to agree: he\u2019d have hated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":35479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bloggers-karamazov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}