My Literary and Moral Meanderings

My Literary and Moral Meanderings was written in response to a challenge from the Dostoevsky brothers Fyodor and Mikhail; they asked Apollon Grigoryev to write an autobiography that included his childhood. The childhood autobiography was already an established genre in Russia, with writers like Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Herzen making well-known contributions. But Meanderings was much more than a memoir. It was an experiment in which Grigoryev examined his childhood through the lens of “orga...