ABSTRACT
The incoherent and erratic nature of Dostoevskii's characters becomes comprehensible in the light of the discovery of the incoherent and erratic nature of the mind. The enthusiastic reception of E. H. Carr's book testifies to the opening of a new season in the reception of Dostoevskii, a season in which more attention will be paid to forms of criticism concerned with the literary value of Dostoevskii's work. Even acknowledging the extraordinary power of Dostoevskii's psychological insight, the limitations that the label 'writer of the unconscious' imposes on the artist are commensurate with the limits of the application of psychoanalytic theories to literature. Edwin Muir, reviewing Janko Lavrin's study in Latitudes, offers the reader the limits of psychoanalytic criticism. In 1929 the critic Mikhail Bakhtin had written the first version of his important Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, where he engaged with the Dostoevskian novel and its links with a vast literary tradition that goes back to Menippean satire.
