Michael R. Katz

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 “organic criticism,” a literary critical theory that he had painfully worked out over the years. His memoir undertook to uncover the currents that shaped Russian reality through their revelation in literature. Western readers might find the primacy ascribed by the author to literature in shaping national consciousness strange. But in Russia, writers are often seen as secular prophets, and although a minor literary figure, Grigoryev personified the type and exercised a profound influence on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and other great writers of his time.