With its highly uncommon attentiveness to Dostoevsky’s mathematical imagination and to the history of mathematics in the Russian Empire, Marsh-Soloway’s book offers a fresh and illuminating explanation of how this strident critic of modernity can remain, one hundred and forty years after his death, so strikingly modern.

Vadim Shneyder, University of California, Los Angeles

Ambitious and highly relevant in our STEM-focused day and age, this book represents a substantial contribution to Russian literary and intellectual history. This meticulous study demonstrates the centrality of mathematical thinking in the writer’s philosophy and in his poetics. Thoroughly examining the curriculum of the Engineering School where Dostoevsky studied and its context in the history of Russian mathematics, Michael Marsh-Soloway demonstrates that when Dostoevsky renounced his career as a military engineer, he channeled far more of his scientific and technical education into his fiction writing than scholars and readers have previously noticed. An example of true interdisciplinarity, this book treats mathematics as a fully valid language in its own right, woven inextricably into the words, stories, and actions of Dostoevsky’s most compelling intellectual rebels.

Carol Apollonio, Duke University

Like Leo Tolstoy, who used calculus and the analogy of integration to conceptualize his philosophy of history, Fyodor Dostoevsky embedded mathematics in his novels to develop and express the existential stances and worldviews of his literary characters. Michael Marsh-Soloway’s excellent book is the first English-language work to focus entirely on Dostoevsky’s engagement with mathematical concepts such as imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean geometry, infinity, probability theory, 'Pascal’s Wager,' the deductive heuristics of regula falsi and reductio ad absurdum, and statistical fallacies, among others, thereby making a significant contribution not only to Dostoevsky scholarship, but also to the study of mathematics in literature and to the growing fields of multidisciplinary research.

Victoria Juharyan, Johns Hopkins University

This rigorous examination of Dostoevsky’s works brings together mathematics and metaphysics. Thanks to his own familiarity with mathematical concepts, Michael Marsh-Soloway is able to elucidate how Dostoevsky’s training as an engineer comes through in the writer’s attempts to find answers to philosophical questions. As a result, we are offered a critical reading of an important yet often undervalued side of Dostoevsky’s intellectual background.

Katya Jordan, Brigham Young University