Fyodor Dostoevsky Draws In His Manuscripts – Art of The Doodler

Do Fyodor Dostoevsky's drawings fond in his notebooks dhow us his state of mind and the creative process?

By Paul Sorene on August 29, 2021

More than 200 sheets of Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s notebooks and manuscripts contain drawings, among them mainly portraits, sketches of Gothic windows and arches, arabesques and calligrams. Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) did not make his doodles for public view. His graphics do not illustrate the corresponding novels but are pictorial notes that make a link or suggest a line of thought or character development, a form of non-verbal communication, essentially hermeneutic and surely impossible to fully interpret without asking the writer.

 

Missed Connections in “Dostoevsky in Love”

BY ROSS COLLIN

March 25, 2021

Across his fiction, journalism, and letters, Fyodor Dostoevsky spoke in many voices. He spoke as a radical who would face mock execution and years in prison for plotting against the tsar. He spoke as a Russian Orthodox believer excoriating liberal society for its smallness and lack of faith. He spoke as a prophet carrying the flame of Russian literature toward a new day. As Dostoevsky said of his novels but could have said of his life: many “stories get squashed into a single one so that there’s neither proportion nor harmony.”

Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov by Somerset Maugham

 

Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov

by William Somerset Maugham

The Art of Fiction

Henry Fielding and Tom Jones

Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice

Stendhal and Le Rouge et le Noir

Balzac and Le Père Goriot

Charles Dickens and David Copperfield

Flaubert and Madame Bovary

Herman Melville and Moby Dick

Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights

Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy and War and Peace

In Conclusion

(1)

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821. His father, a surgeon at the Hospital of St. Mary in Moscow, was a member of the nobility, a fact to which Dostoevsky seems to have attached importance, since he was distressed when on his condemnation his rank, such as it was, was taken away from him; and on his release from prison he pressed influential friends to have it restored. But nobility in Russia was different from what it was in other European countries; it could be acquired, for instance, by reaching a certain modest rank in the government service, and appears to have had little more significance than to set you apart from the peasant and the tradesman, and allow you to look upon yourself as a gentleman. In point of fact, Dostoevsky’s family belonged to the white-collar class of poor professional men. His father was a stern man. He deprived himself not only of luxury, but even of comfort, in order to give his seven children a good education; and from their earliest years taught them that they must accustom themselves to hardship and misfortune to prepare themselves for the duties and obligations of life. They lived crowded together in the two or three rooms at the hospital which were the doctor’s quarters. They were never allowed to go out alone, they were given no pocket money, they had no friends. The doctor had some private practice besides his hospital salary and, in course of time, acquired a small property some hundred miles from Moscow, and there, from then on, mother and children spent the summer. It was their first taste of freedom.

When Dostoevsky was sixteen, his mother died, and the doctor took his two elder sons, Michael and Fyodor, to St. Petersburg to put them to school at the Military Engineering Academy. Michael, the elder, was rejected on account of his poor physique, and Fyodor was thus parted from the only person he cared for. He was lonely and unhappy. His father either would not, or could not, send him money, and he was unable to buy such necessities as books and boots, or even to pay the regular charges of the institution. The doctor, having settled his elder sons, and parked three other children with an aunt in Moscow, gave up his practice and retired with his two youngest daughters to his property in the country. he took to drink. He had been severe with his children, he was brutal with his serfs, and one day they murdered him.

Fyodor was then eighteen. He worked well, though without enthusiasm, and, having completed his term at the Academy, was appointed to the Engineering Department of the ministry of War. What with his share of his father’s estate and his salary, he had then five thousand roubles a year. That, at the time, in English money would have been a little more than three hundred pounds. He rented an apartment, conceived an expensive passion for billiards, flung money away right and left, and when a year later he resigned his commission, because he found service in the Engineering Department ‘as dull as potatoes’, he was deeply in debt. He remained in debt till the last years of his life. He was a hopeless spendthrift, and though his thriftlessness drove him to despair, he never acquired the strength of mind to resist his caprices. It has been suggested by one of his biographers that his want of self-confidence was to an extent responsible for his habit of squandering money, since it gave him a passing sense of power and so gratified his exorbitant vanity. It will be seen later to what mortifying straits this unhappy failing reduced him.

The Brothers Karamazov / The Secret Source of Putin's Evil

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

THE SECRET SOURCE OF PUTIN’S EVIL

It’s not the K.G.B., or the Cold War. It’s decidedly more Pushkin-esque, or Peter the Great, than that.

BY PETER SAVODNIK
JANUARY 10, 2017

Henry Kissinger recently compared Vladimir Putin to “a character out of Dostoevsky,” which apparently delighted the Russian president. That’s not entirely surprising. No Russian writer encapsulates the many incongruous feelings and forces—cultural, spiritual, metaphysical—still coursing through the post-Soviet moment better than Fyodor Dostoevsky.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

WHITE NIGHTS

by  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

a sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer

FIRST NIGHT

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!... Speaking of capricious and ill-humoured people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was; that was why I felt as though they were all deserting me when all Petersburg packed up and went to its summer villa. I felt afraid of being left alone, and for three whole days I wandered about the town in profound dejection, not knowing what to do with myself. Whether I walked in the Nevsky, went to the Gardens or sauntered on the embankment, there was not one face of those I had been accustomed to meet at the same time and place all the year. They, of course, do not know me, but I know them. I know them intimately, I have almost made a study of their faces, and am delighted when they are gay, and downcast when they are under a cloud. I have almost struck up a friendship with one old man whom I meet every blessed day, at the same hour in Fontanka. Such a grave, pensive countenance; he is always whispering to himself and brandishing his left arm, while in his right hand he holds a long gnarled stick with a gold knob. He even notices me and takes a warm interest in me. If I happen not to be at a certain time in the same spot in Fontanka, I am certain he feels disappointed. That is how it is that we almost bow to each other, especially when we are both in good humour. The other day, when we had not seen each other for two days and met on the third, we were actually touching our hats, but, realizing in time, dropped our hands and passed each other with a look of interest.

White Nights review / Masterly staging of Dostoevsky’s unrequited love story

 

White Nights review – masterly staging of Dostoevsky’s unrequited love story

Pitlochry Festival theatre
Brian Ferguson performs with mesmerising verve in this poignant, desperately funny portrait of existential misery

Mark Fisher

Friday 9 July 2021

‘I

am alone,” says the narrator of Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story, a man who has had so little interaction with the world that he has no life story to tell. In a quest for connection, he paces the streets of St Petersburg, spotting familiar faces but remaining unrecognised. His isolation is existential; for all his dreams and desires, he has left no mark behind.

‘Idiots Karamazov’ / Zany Musical

 

Play: ‘Idiots Karamazov,’ Zany Musical

By Mel Gussow
Nov. 11, 1974

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“The Idiots Karamazov,” which opened last night at the Yale Repertory Theater, is, more or legs, a musical comedy based on “The Brothers Karamazov,” which is enough to make Dostoyevsky turn over in his grave. Actually there is nothing grave about this antic undertaking. A travesty by Christopher Durang and Albert F. Innaurato, two recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama, it is as precocious as it sounds — but it also has moments of comic inspiration.

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky in Love by Alex Christofi review – unpredictable, dangerous and thrilling

His marriages were disastrous but his words were so rousing they made strangers embrace ... a superb study of the Russian novelist

Frances Wilson

Thu 14 January 2021 

T

he first time he fell in love, Fyodor Dostoevsky was in his mid-30s. He had written two famous novels, Poor Folk and The Double, been arrested for treason, suffered a mock-execution, and served four years of hard labour in Siberia. He was now, in 1854, serving as a private in the army and the object of his desire, Maria Isaeva, was the capricious and consumptive wife of a drunkard called Alexander.

Dostoevsky

Can Dostoevsky Still Kick You in the Gut?

David Denbe

June 11, 2012

Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text—the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St. Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man. As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago.

Dostoyevsky / Beauty

The Veil
París, 2002
by Donata Wenders

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

BEAUTY

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazo

How Dostoevsky influenced Edvard Munch

APR 19 2019

ALEXANDRA GUZEVA

Ever get the impression that the somber pictures of Munch are ready-made illustrations for the equally somber works of Dostoevsky? We do, and it turns out there’s more to this hunch than meets the eye.

In April, Russia’s first ever major exhibition of one of Norway’s most famous sons, Edvard Munch, opens at the Tretyakov Gallery after several years of negotiations with the Munch Museum in Oslo. Although relatively few of his paintings are known in Russia, Munch’s work has a greater connection with Russia than one might imagine. His idol and inspiration was Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the artist’s most famous piece The Scream looks as if it is possessed by one of Dostoevsky’s demons.

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893

National Gallery of Norway

The director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova, noted that Munch essentially did for art what Dostoevsky did for literature: “He turned the human soul inside out and peered into the abyss and the vortex of passions that rip people apart, revealing the complexity of human nature.”

Dostoevsky

Top 10 toxic families in fiction

From Edward St Aubyn’s damaged addict to Roald Dahl’s ingenious bookworm, Hannah Beckerman picks her favourite tales of families at war

Hannah Beckerman
Wed 20 Mar 2019 11.00 GMT

Magical morality tale … Matilda. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

T

oxic families in fiction go back as far as the art of storytelling itself. Greek mythology is awash with dysfunctional families, from Kronos swallowing his children to ensure they never usurp him to Zeus and the Olympians overthrowing their parents, the Titans. The Old Testament gives us fratricide with Cain and Abel, sibling rivalry with Joseph and his brothers, and the devastating effects of parental favouritism with Jacob and Esau. Fairytales delight in wicked stepmothers, neglectful fathers and evil sisters. For 3,000 years or more, storytellers have known that there is no narrative so powerful as the warring family.

Irvine Welsh's Top Ten List

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Reader Bio

Irvine Welsh (born 1958) is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer whose work is characterized by raw dialect and fierce depictions of life in Edinburgh. He achieved instant fame with his first novel, Trainspotting (1993), which recalled both Last Exit to Brooklynand A Clockwork Orange in its electric use of brutal street slang to tell the story of a group of nihilistic young heroin addicts with no dreams or possibilities. His other novels include Filth (1998),Porno (2002), Crime (2008) and The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (2014). His latest new, A Decent Ride (2015), short-listed for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler—a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent. His four short story collections include The Acid House (1994) and Reheated Cabbage (2009). For more information, visit hisofficial website.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922). Filled with convoluted plotting, scrambled syntax, puns, neologisms, and arcane mythological allusions, Ulysses recounts the misadventures of schlubby Dublin advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on a single day, June 16, 1904. As Everyman Bloom and a host of other characters act out, on a banal and quotidian scale, the major episodes of Homer’s ­Odyssey—including encounters with modern-day sirens and a Cyclops—Joyce’s bawdy mock-epic suggests the improbability, perhaps even the pointlessness, of heroism in the modern age.

2. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997). A finalist for the National Book Award, this literary page-turner is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, it has been called a “dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.”

3. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985). D. H. Lawrence famously remarked that the archetypal American hero was a stoic, a loner, and a killer. Cormac McCarthy’s tale of the formation and dissolution of a band of scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the late 1840s embodies that dire maxim. Led by a soldier named Glanton and a mysterious, hairless, moral monstrosity known as the “Judge,” these freebooters wipe out Indians, Mexicans, and each other amidst a landscape of such sublime desolation one feels it leaching into their very souls.

4. Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs (1981). This  novel follows various plot strands – including 18^th century pirates seeking to live lives of freedom according to articles written by Captain James Mission; a present-day detective, “Clem Snide, Private Asshole,” investigating the ritual sex murder of young boys, and the rise of a radioactive virus that may involve the CIA. An opium-infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary author of Naked Lunch, it is the first of the trilogy with The Places of the Dead Roads and his final novel, The Western Lands.

5. A Disaffection by James Kelman (1989). Patrick Doyle is a 29 year old Glasgow teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher.

6. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880). In perhaps the consummate Russian novel, Dostoevsky dramatizes the spiritual conundrums of nineteenth-century Russia through the story of three brothers and their father’s murder. Hedonistic Dmitri, tortured intellectual Ivan, and saintly Alyosha embody distinct philosophical positions, while remaining full-fledged human beings. Issues such as free will, secularism, and Russia’s unique destiny are argued not through authorial polemic, but through the confessions, diatribes, and nightmares of the characters themselves. An unsparing portrayal of human vice and weakness, the novel ultimately imparts a vision of redemption. Dostoevsky’s passion, doubt, and imaginative power compel even the secular West he scorned.

7. Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh (1952). Meet Guy Crouchback, a 35-year-old divorced Catholic. Though the armed services really don't want him, he manfully succeeds in joining the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during World War II. There he meets Apthorpe, an eccentric African who is devoted to his “thunderbox” (aka chemical closet). Together they make quite a team. This is the first book in Waugh’s “Swords of Honour” trilogy which explores war, religion and politics. It is followed by Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender(1961).

8. Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray (1981). In the maverick Scottish author’s testy allegory, four (eccentrically illustrated) “books,” which are presented nonsequentially, trace the lives of two protagonists who are a single frustrated artist. Grim naturalism depicts Glaswegian painter Duncan Thaw’s losing battles with public indifference and chronic illness. Blakean fantasy traces the parallel sufferings of Thaw’s eponymous alter ego, whose misadventures in the dystopian city of Unthank represent Thaw’s continuing miseries in the hereafter he inhabits following his suicide. Accusatory, opaque, redundant—the novel is also, oddly enough, compulsively readable and perversely memorable.

9. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934). The heartbreaking, semiautobiographical story of two expatriate Americans living in France during the 1920s: a gifted young psychiatrist, Dick Diver, and the wealthy, troubled patient who becomes his wife. In this tragic tale of romance and character, her lush lifestyle soon begins to destroy Diver, as alcohol, infidelities, and mental illness claim his hopes. Of the book, Fitzgerald wrote, “Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith.”

10. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). This novel might easily have become a victim of its own surpassing fame, which has removed all suspense from its central riddle: What is the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Yet as our narrator plumbs Dr. Jekyll’s descent into drug-addled, alter-ego madness, we are riveted by Stevenson’s portrait of the good and evil that lurks in one man’s heart. “This, too, was myself,” Jekyll says of Hyde. Somehow we suspect it’s us, too.

THE TOP TEN

The Top Ten / Books / Reader List

Reader Lists

Top Ten Books

Doug Pearl's Top Ten List

1. The Stories of Anton Chekhov

2. The Stranger by Albert Camus

3. 1984 by George Orwell

4. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

5. Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

6. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

7. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

8. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

9. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

10. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

Kyle L's Top Ten List

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

4. 1984 by George Orwell

5. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

6. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

7. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

10. The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde

C. G. Mackay's Top Ten List

1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

4. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

5. All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque

6. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

7. The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo

8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

9. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

10. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Hannah Eason's Top Ten List

1. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

2. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

3. The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

4. Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller

5. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

6. Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons

7. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

8. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

9. Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

10. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Matt Crozier's Top Ten List

1. Metamorphoses by- Ovid

2. Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

3. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

4. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare

5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

6. Gain by Richard Powers

7. Aeneid by Virgil

8. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

9. Stoner by John Williams

10. Stone's Fall by Iain Pears

Jack Price's Top Ten List

1. The poems of Emily Dickinson

2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

3. Middlemarch by George Eliot

4. Ulysses by James Joyce

5. Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertholt Brecht

6. Howards End by E.M. Forster

7. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

8. The poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

9. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

10. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Stephen Yuan's Top Ten List

1. Trilogy by Samuel Beckett

2. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

3. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

4. Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) by Wallace Stevens

5. The Book of Job

6. The Symposium by Plato

7. His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem

8. Macbeth by Williams Shakespeare

9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

10. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Matthew Ackerman's Top Ten List

1. Underworld bye Don DeLillo

2. In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

3. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

4. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5. The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

6. The Trial by Franz Kafka

7. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

8. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

9. The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis

10. JR by William Gaddis

Aqua1's Top Ten List

1. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

5. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

6. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

7. The Insulted and Humiliated by Fyodor Dostoevsky

8. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

9. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

10. Germinal by Emile Zola

Jori Peka's Top Ten List

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

2. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

3. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

4. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

5. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

6. Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem by Emilio Salgari

7. Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino

8. Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto

9. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado

10. Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Patricia Abbott's Top Ten List

1. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

2. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

3. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

4. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

6. True Grit by Charles Portis

7. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

8. The Stories of Alice Munro

9. The Stories of Raymond Carver

10. Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan

AAA's Top Ten List

1. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

4. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

5. The Divine Comedy by Dante

6. King Lear by William Shakespeare

7. Antigone by Sophocles

8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. Silas Marner by George Eliot

10. The Iliad by Homer

Shannon Whitfield's Top Ten List

1. The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson

2. The Novels of Carson McCullers

3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

4. A Cry of Angels by Jeff Fields

5. The Grass Harp by Truman Capote

6. Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes

7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

8. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

9. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Takamats's Top Ten List

1. L'étranger by Albert Camus

2. 海辺のカフカ (Kafka on the shore) by Murakami Haruki

3. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

4. Ulysses by James Joyce

5. Oeuvres poetiques by Jean Senac

6. Poems by Nâzım Hikmet

7. Le deuxième sexe by Simone de Beauvoir

8. Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

9. En attendant Godot by Samuel Beckett

10. 源氏物語 (Genji Monogatari, The Tale of Genji) by Lady Murasaki

Martin Crawley's Top Ten List

1. Hunger by Knut Hamsun

2. Death on the Installment Plan by L.F.Celine

3. How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman

4. The Castle by Franz Kafka

5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

6. Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald

7. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

8. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

9. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

10. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Jennah Dussault's Top Ten List

1. Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. King Lear by William Shakespeare

4. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

5. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen

6. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

7. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

9. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

10. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Mathieu Connor's Top Ten List

1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

4. Middlemarch by George Elliot

5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

7. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

8. Ulysses by James Joyce

9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

10. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Galsworthy's Top Ten List

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

4. Ulysses by James Joyce

5. Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

6. Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare

7. Essays by Michel de Montaigne

8. The World Crisis by Winston Churchill

9. Middlemarch by George Eliot

10. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Forrest's Top Ten List

1. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

3. The Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm X

4. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

5. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

6. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

7. The Diary of Anne Frank

8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

9. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

10. Animal Farm by George Orwell

Life's Top Ten List

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

3. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

4. The Divine Comedy by Dante

5. Iliad by Homer

6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

8. King Lear by William Shakespeare

9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

10. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Michael Austin's Top Ten List

1. Don Quixote by Cervantes

2. The Divine Comedy by Dante

3. Aeneid by Virgil

4. King Lear by Shakespeare

5. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky

6. War and Peace by Tolstoy

7. The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki

8. 1001 Nights

9. The Book of Job

10. Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en

Juliette Soubise's Top Ten List

1. Reading Turgenev by William Trevor

2. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

3. Beloved by Toni Morrison

4. A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart

5. Fly Away Peter by David Malouf

6. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

7. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

8. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth

9. Wanting by Richard Flanagan

10. Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Conner

Nick Stratton's Top Ten List

1. The Magus by John Fowles

2. Stoner by John Williams

3. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

4. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

5. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

6. The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

7. The Great Gatsbey by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. Arkansas by John Brandon

9. Portnoy's Complaint by Phillip Roth

10. Breath by Tim Winton

Steve Morrison's Top Ten List

1. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

2. King Lear, by William Shakespeare

3. The Bible

4. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust

5. Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto

6. The Golden Ass, by Apuleius

7. Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen

8. Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais

9. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

10. Ulysses, by James Joyce

William Brennan's Top Ten List

1. Great Short Works by Leo Tolstoy

2. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

3. The Complete Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway

4. Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

5. Light In August by William Faulkner

6. 1984 by George Orwell

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

10. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Anastasia’s Top Ten List

1. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen

2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

3. Possession by A.S. Byatt

4. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

5. The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

6. The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

7. An Autobiography by Agatha Christie

8. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

9. The April Wiych by Majgull Axelsson

10. Making History by Stephen Fry

THE TOP TEN