ABSTRACT
Dostoevsky has often been called a prophet, both by his Russian contemporaries and by many of his subsequent readers in the Western world. The occasion on which Dostoevsky was perhaps most famously and most publicly hailed as a prophet by his own people took place in June 1880, when he gave a speech on Pushkin at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, a speech in which he described the "prophetic significance" of Pushkin's art. Many of those in the audience, it seems, were also avid readers of his serialized novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and saw immediately the connections between Dostoevsky's interpretation of prophetic elements in Pushkin and Dostoevsky's own prophetic art. In her excellent monograph The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, Diane Thompson offers an illuminating interpretation of how the categories of prophecy and poetics are connected in Dostoevsky's work.
