3I2 SEER, 8i, 2, 2003 the way. But the other term in his title, 'imitation',comes in a very poor third: Mjor treatsthe topic seemingly as an afterthought,in a couple of pages at the very end, with a few unfocused comments, largely on Resurrection and Father Sergius. More care could have been taken at the proof reading stage. I found over twenty mistakes, mostly in the Cyrillic; these can happen, of course, during the transcriptionprocess, but the errorsthat appear in the quotation from Dostoevskii's 'Krotkaia' prefacing Chapter Three, with 'privodit' appearingas 'pritvorit',and 'sravnitel'no'as 'spravedlivo'(p. 67), aremore of a mystery. A furtherirritation arises from the translationpolicy adopted by Mjor. Whereas all the Russian excerpts are translatedinto English (unnecessarily , it might be argued, since this book is clearly aimed at specialists in Russian),quotationsfrom German, sometimes illustratingkeypoints, are not. Although, nevertheless, this study suffers from unevenness and an often blurred focus, the patient reader who is willing to persist with a sometimes ratherlabouredprose style,will not go entirelyunrewarded. Department ofRussian ROGER COCKRELL University ofExeter Leatherbarrow,W. J. (ed.). T7he Cambridge Companion toDostoevskii. Cambridge Companions to Literature.CambridgeUniversity Press,Cambridgeand New York, 2002. XVi + 244 pp. Chronology. Notes. Further Reading. Index. ?14.95: $22.00. PROFESSOR LEATHERBARROW, author of many books on Dostoevskii, has in recent years produced several which have found their way straight on to student reading lists; for example, A Reference GuidetoDostoevskii (SEER, 69, 1991, 2, p. 332) and the Twayne's WorldAuthors volume (New York, I98I). The Cambridge Companion is a no less eminently usefuland reader-friendly compilation. After a Chronology listing the principal dates of Dostoevskii's life against correspondingevents elsewhere, and an explanatoryintroduction by the editor, there are nine essays written by a strong team of British and American scholars,and a fascinatingclosing piece on reading Dostoevskii by Gary Saul Morson. The essaysare mainly concerned with the content of the works, and each makes a valuable contribution to a fresh understanding of particular aspects of the man and writer. One small mystery is the editor's insistence (reiteratedin the blurb)that this is not a 'life and works'approach (pp. 9-Io). This attack on an Aunt Sally (how could a collection follow this approach?)might be thought especially odd in the year when Joseph Frank's multi-volume studyreached its conclusion. Faith Wigzell's substantial and informative essay casts considerable new light on the Russian folk heritage as reflected in many works, early and late; WilliamLeatherbarrowhighlightsinter-textualconnectionsbetween Dostoevskii 'swriting of the I840s and earlier Russian literature;William Mills Todd III discusses Dostoevskii as a professional writer (whilst admitting that the word 'professional' seems not to have been in Dostoevskii's vocabulary [p. 66]); Boris Christarevisitsthe many-faceted theme of money which, as he observes,dominatesthiswriter'sfictionalworld(p. 93);Derek Offordpresents REVIEWS 313 with great lucidity Dostoevskii's often adversarialrelationshipto the Russian and WestEuropean intelligentsia;Robert L. Belknapconsidersanotherbroad topic, 'Dostoevskii and psychology', beginning with the writer'sbackground in this discipline, and going on to a range of topics including crime, art, creation, perception, love and violence; Malcolm Jones's thoughtful and humane essay on Dostoevskii and religion emphasizes his constant struggleto find a faith which had relevance in the modern age; Susanne Fusso writes interestingly on Dostoevskii and the family, seeing the creative effortsof his last years as 'dominated by his desire to produce his own [version of Turgenev's] "Fathersand Sons"' (p. I75); and Diane Oenning Thompson stressesthe writer'sprophetic side in 'Dostoevskiiand science'. The redoubtable Gary Saul Morson never fails to surprise: a recent relativelytrivialexample of thiswas hisAndQuiet FlowstheVodka, writtenunder the pen-name of Alicia Chudo (see SEER,79, 2000, 4, pp. 740-4 ). It was an inspired idea to invite him to conclude a volume that is mainly devoted to themes and ideas with a piece on Dostoevskii's practice as a writer, how his novels work. Morson's essay, ranging from Alicein Wonderland and Milton to Dickens and, of course, Tolstoi for comparison, examines the unfinished, unstructured nature of Dostoevskii's writing, highlighting the lack of foreshadowing and organized form as such, relishingthe incomplete, unplanned, even random natureof many of the novels, the 'cloud of possibilities'(p...