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Drawing on Dostoevsky’s relationship with science, Signs of the Material World explores the literary impacts of nineteenth-century materialism. Dostoevsky’s scientific interlocutors range from Auguste Comte and the “vulgar” materialists to Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, George Henry Lewes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Russian Nikolai Strakhov; in literary terms, Dostoevsky writes in conversation with a wide range of contemporary writers across Europe and the United States, including Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Friedrich Schiller. This talk will sketch the broad contours of Dostoevsky’s combined literary and scientific practice before turning to explore one aspect of that practice in particular: Dostoevsky’s recourse, like Dickens, to an “indexical” allegory that lends itself to the more contingent and relational kind of materiality that Dostoevsky calls “living life.”
Melissa Frazier is Professor of Russian Language and Russian and Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University and subsequently received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research focus on Russian and comparative literature, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth century, including comparative Romanticism and interdisciplinary approaches to the nineteenth-century novel. Frazier is the author of Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the “Library for Reading” (Stanford University Press, 2007; awarded the 2007 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Work in Romanticism Studies by the International Conference on Romanticism) and Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the 19th-Century Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2025). Her current research interests include twenty-first-century Eastern European literature, with a particular focus on contemporary Ukrainian writing.
