This course deals with a close reading of Dostoevsky’s final and perhaps greatest novel and focuses on the ways the writer portrays/investigates the “inner worlds” of its major characters. Dostoevsky’s unique psychological method will be considered against the ideological, scientific, and literary contexts of the 1870s, including political, philosophical, and religious polemics, developments of modern psychology, paradoxes of fashionable modern spiritualism, and the psychological prose of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Students will participate in three debates and write a final essay on the writer’s “spiritual realism.”