Dostoevsky attached introductions to his most challenging narratives,
including Notes from the House of the Dead, Notes from Underground,
The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, and "A Gentle Creature." Despite
his clever attempts to call his readers' attention to these
introductions, they have been neglected as an object of study for over
150 years. That oversight is rectified in First Words, the first
systematic study of Dostoevsky's introductions. Using Genette's typology
of prefaces and Bakhtin's notion of multiple voices, Lewis Bagby reveals
just how important Dostoevsky's first words are to his fiction.
Dostoevsky's ruses, verbal winks, and backward glances indicate a lively
and imaginative author at earnest play in the field of literary
discourse.