Who knew Dostoevsky was this funny? In this superb book, an A-list of scholars tackle the comic side of a writer too often filed on the dark side of the bookshelf. It's all in the angle of vision; the lines between comic and sad, it turns out, can be quite blurry. These diverse, authoritative, and engaging essays reveal a multitude of hilarious goings-on in Dostoevsky's works that readers, bedeviled with the accursed questions, might not have noticed. Laughter–verbal play, punning, jokes, slapstick, physical comedy, gestural excess–serves as a formidable weapon against the much-ballyhooed evil--murder, abuse, crime, misogyny, adultery, rebellion, and existential angst–at the center of his fiction. A criminal, it turns out, cannot stand being laughed at. Read this mind-expanding book. Then go back, reread the fiction, and meet a Dostoevsky you never knew existed.

Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Duke University, USA

This important collection is a landmark publication, placing at the forefront of Dostoevsky studies a hitherto marginal subject and rightly positioning Dostoevsky as a master of comedy. Theoretically adept, written with panache and engaging diverse cultural referents, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of world literature and culture.

Sarah Hudspith, Associate Professor in Russian, University of Leeds, UK

This all-female authored volume is a very timely intervention into the field of Dostoevsky studies, bringing the highly original and much needed perspective of humour into an area of scholarship usually characterized by philosophical and literary high-mindedness. Dostoevsky is well-known as a funny writer amongst Russians, and Mikhail Bakhtin's important studies foreground the importance of ancient comedy as part of the genre memory of Dostoevsky's novels, but in the English-speaking world the importance and philosophical depth of his ideas has up until this point obscured the humour that can be found throughout his oeuvre. This volume provides a comprehensive treatment of Dostoevsky and humour, from Emerson's Bakhtinian intervention, through questions of humour in translation, physical comedy, comedy and the mind/body dichotomy, comedy and politics, comedy and philosophy, restorative parody, and comedy and gender. In the darkness of the contemporary moment, this reassessment of the Russian master's comic voice is more necessary than ever.

Kate Holland, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, Canada, and President of the North American Dostoevsky Society