The Mathematical Mind of F. M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity

by Michael Marsh-Soloway

Overview

The Mathematical Mind of F. M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity reconstructs the curriculum and readings that F. M. Dostoevsky encountered during his studies and connects such sources to the mathematical references and themes in his published works. Prior to becoming a man of letters, Dostoevsky studied at the Main Engineering School in St. Petersburg from 1838 to 1843. After he was arrested, submitted to mock execution by firing squad, and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia for his involvement in the revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle in 1849, most of his books and journals from the period of his education were confiscated, and destroyed by the Third Section of the Russian Secret Police. Although most scholars discount the legacy of his engineering studies, the literary aesthetics of his works communicate an acute awareness of mathematical principles and debates. This book unearths subtexts in works by Dostoevsky, communicating veins of mathematical thought that evolved throughout Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666948097
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	11/19/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	394
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Michael Marsh-Soloway is director of the Global Studio at the University of Richmond.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Mathematical Terminology
Chronology of Biographical Events
Introduction: Tracing the Origins of Dostoevsky’s Mathematical Aesthetics
Chapter 1: Dostoevsky’s Education at the Main Military Engineering School, 1838-1843
Chapter 2: The Certainty of Uncertainty, 2x2=5, and the Ontological Unity of the Real and the Imaginary in Notes from Underground
Chapter 3: Null Sets, Pitfalls of Insolvability, and a Refutation of Utilitarian Calculus in Crime and Punishment
Chapter 4: Probability, Spirituality, and Free Will Predicated on Unpredictability in The Gambler with Reference to the Personal Life and Other Writings of F.M. Dostoevsky
Chapter 5: “There is no virtue, if there is no immortality”: Non-Euclidean Metaphysics and the Fallibility of Scientific Determinism in “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and The Brothers Karamazov
Conclusion: A Dynamic Mathematical Legacy
Appendix: The Historical Development of Mathematics in Imperial Russia
Bibliography
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

This rigorous examination of Dostoevsky’s works brings together mathematics and metaphysics. Thanks to his own familiarity with mathematical concepts, Michael Marsh-Soloway is able to elucidate how Dostoevsky’s training as an engineer comes through in the writer’s attempts to find answers to philosophical questions. As a result, we are offered a critical reading of an important yet often undervalued side of Dostoevsky’s intellectual background.

Katya Jordan

With its highly uncommon attentiveness to Dostoevsky’s mathematical imagination and to the history of mathematics in the Russian Empire, Marsh-Soloway’s book offers a fresh and illuminating explanation of how this strident critic of modernity can remain, one hundred and forty years after his death, so strikingly modern.

Vadim Shneyder

Like Leo Tolstoy, who used calculus and the analogy of integration to conceptualize his philosophy of history, Fyodor Dostoevsky embedded mathematics in his novels to develop and express the existential stances and worldviews of his literary characters. Michael Marsh-Soloway’s excellent book is the first English-language work to focus entirely on Dostoevsky’s engagement with mathematical concepts such as imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean geometry, infinity, probability theory, #39;Pascal’s Wager,#39; the deductive heuristics of regula falsi and reductio ad absurdum, and statistical fallacies, among others, thereby making a significant contribution not only to Dostoevsky scholarship, but also to the study of mathematics in literature and to the growing fields of multidisciplinary research.

Victoria Juharyan

Ambitious and highly relevant in our STEM-focused day and age, this book represents a substantial contribution to Russian literary and intellectual history. This meticulous study demonstrates the centrality of mathematical thinking in the writer’s philosophy and in his poetics. Thoroughly examining the curriculum of the Engineering School where Dostoevsky studied and its context in the history of Russian mathematics, Michael Marsh-Soloway demonstrates that when Dostoevsky renounced his career as a military engineer, he channeled far more of his scientific and technical education into his fiction writing than scholars and readers have previously noticed. An example of true interdisciplinarity, this book treats mathematics as a fully valid language in its own right, woven inextricably into the words, stories, and actions of Dostoevsky’s most compelling intellectual rebels.

Carol Apollonio