A Writer's Diary by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Published 1877 · 1,097 pages · 620,000 words · about 41 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Politics & Society, Nonfiction
How hard is A Writer's Diary to read?
A Writer's Diary scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Nineteenth-century Russian journalism in translation: legal terminology from the new jury courts, theological and political vocabulary, and a crowd of contemporary names — editors, lawyers, generals — that annotations must identify. Elevated but never deliberately obscure.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Dostoevsky's feverish periodic sentences, stacked with qualifications, asides, and self-interruptions — 'I note in passing' — carry over from the novels into the journalism. Less dense than The Brothers Karamazov, still unmistakably his syntax.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- A philosophy of history — Russia's messianic destiny, the coming brotherhood of man, the psychology of the suicide epidemic — argued through the week's news items, trials, and obituaries. The abstraction always launches from a concrete anecdote and returns to prophecy.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Packed with the running events of the 1870s: the Kroneberg and Kornilova trials, the Eastern Question and the Balkan war, polemics with named journalists, séances, foundling homes. Modern readers need the notes, and nearly every page assumes yesterday's newspaper.
How A Writer's Diary is regarded
A Writer's Diary holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.