ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the ways in which three of Dostoevky’s texts from the 1860s – Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot –negotiate moods as modes of individual and collective experience which are fundamentally tied to the modern age. By exploring the existential condition of the alienated subject in the modern city, the Notes and Crime and Punishment in particular speak to the disturbed attunement between self and world that modernity has sparked. The Idiot, meanwhile, considers the collectivity of affective experience, with which it engages not only on the level of its plot but also in its communication with readers.
