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Like Balzac and Dickens, Dostoevsky is one of the great mythographers of the modern city; and, like them, he was a journalist as well as a novelist. The motley contents of his Diary of a Writer are, if not well known, at least available to the curious in English translation. His journalism before 1873 is a different matter: this work remains untranslated and largely unexamined, though it contains much that sheds light on his artistic practice—including the feuilletons, published at the very beginning of his career and called, significantly, a “Petersburg Chronicle.” What they show us is the young writer, in search of a persona, confronting the city and experimenting with the themes and attitudes that would later go into his myth of Petersburg.The terms of the experiment were in good part furnished by the times.

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