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The city of Bombay is the subject of Dhasal’s
first collection of poems called Golpitha (1973).
When the famous Indian playwright Vinay Ten-
dulkar offered to write the introduction to
Dhasal’s collection, Dhasal insisted that he first
come on a walking tour of Golpitha, a red-light
district, before writing anything. Dhasal’s portraits
of the inhabitants in Golpitha vividly capture “life
gone wrong” in a world of poverty, filth, and vio-
lence. Paradox, however, is a defining feature of
Dhasal’s style and the harsh realism of his poetry is
coupled with images that are both alluring and
hopeful. In an untitled poem from Khel (Play,
1983), for example, “Butterflies of hibiscus” dance
under the sun that throws love over a “wounded
dog” turning in circles.
Since Golpitha, Dhasal has written two novels
and several collections of poetry. Dhasal writes in
Marathi and a hybrid of Hindi and Urdu. His
work, written in the language of the streets, has
been called a translator’s nightmare. In spite of
this, Dhasal’s poetry has been translated into nu-
merous European languages, and he has traveled
widely to read his poetry.
Dhasal was one of the founders of the Dalit Pan-
thers in 1972. In 1990, he joined mainstream poli-
tics and became a member of the Indian Republican
Party. He received the Padma Shri from the president
of India for his outstanding contribution to Indian
literature and was chosen to represent India at the
first International Literary Festival in Berlin in 2001.
Another Work by Namdeo Dhasal
“The Poems of Namdeo Dhasal,” in An Anthology of
Dalit Literature. Edited by Mulk Raj Anand and
Eleanor Zelliot. Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books,
1992.
Dinesen, Isak (Karen Christence
Dinesen, Baroness Karen Blixen,
Osceola, Pierre Andrézel)
(1885–1962)
short-story writer, novelist
Isak Dinesen was born in Rungsted, Denmark, to
wealth and privilege. Her father, Wilhelm Dine-
sen, was an army officer and a writer. Her mother,
Ingeborg Westenholz Dinesen, was from a promi-
nent business family. Dinesen studied painting at
the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen
from 1903 to 1906. In 1907, she published several
short stories in a Danish monthly, but these
works attracted little attention. In 1914, Dinesen
married Swedish nobleman Baron Bror Blixen-
Finecke and settled on a coffee plantation
in Kenya. They later divorced, and Dinesen
moved back to Denmark after the plantation
went bankrupt in 1931.
Dinesen’s writing career thrived after she re-
turned to Rungsted. Critics in Great Britain and
the United States praised her first major work,
Seven Gothic Tales (1934), for its sophistication and
imaginative use of fantasy. Dinesen’s description of
her experiences in Africa, Den africanske farm (Out
of Africa, 1937), was later made into a movie. Dur-
ing World War II, she wrote Sorg-Acre (Sorrow
Acre, 1942), a story set in a rural Denmark that
many consider to be her masterpiece.
Dinesen’s influences included her father, the
Bible, Danish romantic writers, the Arabian Nights,
and the Icelandic sagas. Many of her works, in-
cluding Sorrow Acre, reflect Dinesen’s belief that an
individual’s fate is in the hands of God. She wrote
about the topics of love and dreams in her many
imaginative tales of fantasy. However, irony de-
stroys romanticism in many of Dinesen’s stories,
which critic Curtis Cate describes as “sophisti-
cated,” “psychologically subtle,” and “philosophi-
cally speculative.”
Another Work by Isak Dinesen
Last Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Works about Isak Dinesen
Cate, Curtis. “Isaac Dinesen: The Scheherazade
of Our Times.” In Olga A. Pelensky, ed., Isak
Dinesen: Critical Views. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1993.
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a
Storyteller. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
118 Dinesen, Isak
Ding Ling (Jiang Bingzhi) (1904–1986)
novelist, short-story and nonfiction writer
Jiang Bingzhi was born on October 12 in Hunan
Province’s Linli County in China. After her father’s
death, she lived with her uncle in Changde. She
was introduced to ideas of revolution and democ-
racy at a young age because Changde was a focal
point for the 1911 republican revolution to over-
throw the Qing dynasty. At 17, she attended a
Communist school in Shanghai and later Shanghai
University. In 1923, she left for Beijing, where
China’s “new culture” was developing. She could
not afford to attend lectures at Beijing University,
so she read Western and Eastern writers. She also
learned to paint, and in 1925, she married Hu
Yepin, a revolutionary writer.
In 1927, Ding Ling published to great acclaim
her first short story, “Meng Ke,” based on her own
experience at an unsuccessful film audition. Its
publication was quickly followed by “Miss Sophie’s
Diary,” a story about a girl with tuberculosis and
her fruitless desire to find love. The next year,
she published her first short-story collection, In
the Dark.
In 1930, Ding Ling and her husband joined the
proletarian literary movement in Shanghai, where
they joined the newly formed League of Left-wing
Writers headed by LU Xun. Hu Yepin was executed
by the Nationalists for his involvement in the Chi-
nese Communist Party (CCP) underground, an
event that plunged Ding Ling into the revolution.
Ding Ling herself was later kidnapped by the
Guomingdang (GMD) Nationalist Party.
Amidst her political activity, Ding Ling was also
busy writing. She edited The Dipper, the league’s
literary magazine, and published Flood, a major
revolutionary work of social realist (see
SOCIALIST
REALISM
) fiction about peasants exploited by local
despots during a disaster. In 1933, she also pub-
lished the first part of the novel Mother, about a
spirited heroine during the 1911 revolution, a
character based loosely on her own mother.
After her release from Nationalist prison in
1936, Mao Zedong welcomed her with two poems
he wrote in her honor at the Yan’an Communist
base. She began to work on the Liberation Daily’s
literary supplement. When the Sino-Japanese War
broke out in 1937, Ding Ling performed field and
propaganda work and wrote stories from the front.
An outspoken woman yet a loyal servant of both
literature and communism, she voiced opinions on
inequities within the supposedly egalitarian party,
especially in regard to women, at the Yan’an Forum
on Literature and Art in 1942.
During the next decade, Ding Ling continued
her literary endeavors, writing, among other
pieces, a novel about land reform, The Sun Shines
over the Sanggan River (1949), which won the
Stalin Prize for literature. She also traveled exten-
sively abroad, lecturing on literature and produc-
ing essays, literary criticism, and speeches. She
frequently wrote about women, both in her stories
and in essays, advocating feminist thought,
women’s sexual freedom, and the rights to seek di-
vorce and not to marry. Her writing was frequently
considered scandalous, but it also explored the
new dimensions of Chinese womanhood under
China’s rapidly changing sociopolitical landscape.
In 1955, Ding Ling came under fire from the
party leadership. She was accused of heading an
antiparty clique and was criticized for the sexual
content of her stories. During the brief open pe-
riod of the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956,
her plea to make literature independent earned her
the label of rightist, as well as party expulsion in
1957. She was “sent down”to do physical labor in a
reclamation area in the Great Northern Wilderness
in Heilongjiang Province.
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966,
Ding Ling did not escape persecution. She was
imprisoned from 1970 to 1975 in Beijing and then
removed to a commune in Shanxi. After the revo-
lution, she was officially restored in a 1979 verdict
and again became a respected member of the es-
tablishment.
As part of the “scar” literature by writers who
survived the Cultural Revolution, Ding Ling pub-
lished essays and stories about her experiences and
those of her friends. In 1981, she and her second
husband, Chen Ming, moved to a convalescent
Ding Ling 119
home in Fukien. Although she was in poor health,
she started the literary magazine China in 1985.
She died on March 4.
Another Work by Ding Ling
I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling.
Barlow, Tani E., and Gary J. Bjorge, eds. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1990.
A Work about Ding Ling
Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology
and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Diop, Birago (1906–1989) poet, folklorist
Birago Diop was born into an influential family
in Dakar, Senegal. His father died prematurely
leaving him to be raised by his mother’s family. He
attended high school in the old capital before
going to France to earn his degree as a veterinar-
ian at the University of Toulouse. In Paris, Diop
met many of the founders of NÉGRITUDE, an intel-
lectual and artistic movement that was begun in
Paris by black students from the French colonies.
The movement celebrated a global African iden-
tity, while taking a political stance against colo-
nialism and assimilation. Diop met his compatriot
Léopold Sédar
SENGHOR, a founder of Négritude,
who influenced him to write about African cul-
tural values. Diop used his own cultural back-
ground as a resource, recounting the stories he
was told as a child. In addition, his experience as a
veterinarian allowed him to travel throughout re-
mote areas of French West Africa, giving him ac-
cess to the rural life and values of traditional
Africa.
He is most famous for his work Tales of Amadou
Koumba (1966), an award-winning collection of
folk tales that he translated from Wolof, the most
prevalent indigenous language in Senegal. He is
noted for maintaining its rhythm, imagery, and
subtleties in his transcription of these stories and
for giving the French world access to these ethnic
treasures.
In his poetry, Diop concentrated on the mysti-
cal elements in African culture. He released a po-
etry anthology called Lures and Glimmers (1960)
that captures the spiritual belief system of many
African religions. In 1960, Senghor, the president
of Senegal at the time, appointed Diop ambassador
to Tunisia. Today, Birago Diop is considered a cen-
tral contributor of traditional ethnic resources to
the Négritude movement.
Works about Birago Diop
Gibbs, James. “The Animal Trickster as Political
Satirist and Social Dissident.” In Edris Makward et
al. The Growth of African Literature. Trenton, N.J.:
Africa World Press, 1998.
Tollerson, Marie. Mythology and Cosmology in the
Narratives of Bernard Dadie and Birago Diop.
Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984.
Diop, David (1927–1960) poet
David Diop was born in Bordeaux, France, to a
Senegalese father on tour of duty and a
Cameroonian mother. In his teens, he was deeply
impressed by the poetry of Aimé CÉSAIRE, the co-
founder of NÉGRITUDE, an intellectual movement
started by black students in Paris. These students
were writers from the French colonies who cele-
brated the essence of being African while also crit-
icizing colonialism and assimilation.
As a youth, Diop battled tuberculosis, spending
months in hospitals. These solitary moments gave
rise to many of his most tender poems. While at-
tending high school, he met Léopold
SENGHOR,an-
other founder of the Négritude movement, who
later published some of Diop’s poems. Diop trav-
eled between Africa and Europe, and many of his
poems express a longing for a return to his ances-
tral land of Africa. In “Africa,” for example, he cre-
ates nostalgic images of Africa before colonialism,
but this was an Africa with which he was not fa-
miliar. His only memories were of the aftermath of
slavery and assimilation. When Senegal was close
to gaining its independence in the late 1950s, Diop
moved back to take part in the rebuilding of the
120 Diop, Birago
country. His revolutionary poems and teachings
were his tools of change. Ellen Kennedy, a Négri-
tude historian, quotes Diop as writing that his
poems were meant “to burst the eardrums of those
who do not wish to hear.”
Unfortunately, Diop’s life came to a tragic end
in a plane crash that also destroyed much of his
last, unpublished work. Only 22 of his poems still
exist; yet these clearly established him as a power-
ful contributor to the Négritude movement and to
world literature.
Another Work by David Diop
Hammer Blows and Other Writings. Translated and
edited by Simon Mpondo and Frank Jones.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Djebar, Assia (Fatima Zohra Imalayen)
(1936– ) novelist, playwright, filmmaker,
short-story writer
An Algerian writing in French, Djebar has pro-
duced compelling novels that express Arab
women’s voices in the postcolonial world. She
launched her writing career with the acclaimed
novel, La Soif (1957; published in English as The
Mischief, 1958). She and her ex-husband, Walid
Garn, wrote a play, Rouge l’aube (1969) (Red
Dawn), about the Algerian war of independence.
During the 1960s, Djebar taught history at the
University of Algiers. In the 1970s, she embarked
on a filmmaking career, in part to reach Algerian
women who could not read her work in French,
but she returned to fiction writing in the 1980s.
Her intense, lyrical, often sensual prose articu-
lates the voices of Arab women, as individuals and
as members of a community with a specific politi-
cal history. In Far from Medina (trans. 1994; origi-
nally published as Loin de Médine: filles d’Ismael,
1991), she tells of the participation of Muslim
women in the first days of Islam. Her rich, intricate
historical novel, L’amour, la fantasia (1985; Fanta-
sia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1993), tells the history
of Algeria from the French colonial onslaught in
1830 to the war of independence, ending in 1961.
In this book, Djebar alternates between formal
French accounts and oral histories that are based
on her field interviews in Arabic with Algerian
women who participated in the independence
struggle but whose voices are not included in any
official history. Djebar conceived the story as part
of a quartet that includes its prequel novel, Ombre
Sultane (1987; A Sister to Scheherazade, 1993). “If
Algerian Woman in all her complexity and histor-
ical reality is the protagonist of Assia Djebar’s most
ambitious and original work of fiction,” writes her
translator Dorothy S. Blair in the introduction to
Fantasia, “this is also an attempt to wrest her own
identity as an Algerian woman from the warring
strands of her Arabo-Berber origins and her
Franco-European education.”
Djebar went to primary school in Algeria, at-
tended college in France, and lives in Paris and
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she directs the
Center for French and Francophone Studies at
Louisiana State University. She won the Venice Bi-
ennale Critics Prize for her film La Nouba des
femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979), Prix Maurice
Maeterlinck (1995), Neustadt Prize for Contribu-
tions to World Literature (1996), and the Yource-
nar Prize (1997).
Other Works by Assia Djebar
Algerian White. Translated by Marjolijin De Jager
and David Kelley. New York: Seven Stories Press,
2001.
So Vast the Prison. Translated by Betsy Wing. New
York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Translated by
Marjolijin De Jager. Charlottesville, Va.: University
Press of Virginia, 1992.
Works about Assia Djebar
Merini, Rafika. Two Major Francophone Women
Writers: Assia Djébar and Leila Sebbar: A The-
matic Study of Their Works. New York: Peter
Lang, 1999.
Mortimer, Mildred P. Journeys Through the French
African Novel. Westport, Conn.: Heinemann,
1990.
Djebar, Assia 121
———., ed. Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Tran-
sition. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers,
2001.
Döblin, Alfred (Linke Poot, Hans
Fiedeler)
(1878–1957) short-story writer,
novelist, playwright
Alfred Döblin was born in Stettin, Germany. His
father, a tailor, left the family when Alfred was 10,
and his mother was from a lower-middle-class
Jewish family. Döblin had difficulty in school and
did not pass the Arbitur (school-leaving exam)
until age 22. Döblin studied medicine from 1900 to
1905 in Berlin and Freiburg and, in 1911, opened
a practice as a family doctor and neurologist. In
1912, he married Erna Reiss and served as an army
medical officer during World War I.
Döblin began to write in 1900 and by the early
1910s earned critical acclaim for his expressionist
(see EXPRESSIONISM) short stories that appeared in
the journal Der Stürm. His first novel Die drei
Sprünge des Wang-lun (The Three Leaps of Wang-
lun, 1915) describes a tragic rebellion in China.
Following the war, Döblin wrote theater reviews and
plays in addition to his novels. Döblin’s novel, Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1929), was a popular and critical
success, inspiring a radio play and a film. The story
uses an omniscient anonymous narrative voice,
montage, and parody—techniques inspired by
James Joyce (1882–1941)—to describe the exploits
of an ex-convict in the Berlin underworld.
In 1928, Döblin was elected to the Prussian
Academy of the Arts. He and his friend Bertolt
BRECHT
were members of a leftist discussion group
called Group 1925.After the Nazis gained power in
1933, Döblin lived in France and the United States.
In 1941, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith,
and in 1945, he returned to West Germany. Al-
though Döblin achieved some critical acclaim for
his substantive explorations of human relation-
ships and relationships with God, most of his
works were not popular. His novels were compli-
cated, unconventional, and, according to the
scholar David Dollenmayer, reflective of Döblin’s
“deep sense of unease about himself and his place
in society, and about modern man and society in
general.”
Other Works by Alfred Döblin
Destiny’s Journey. Translated by Edna McCown. New
York: Paragon House, 1992.
Tales of a Long Night: A Novel. Translated by Robert
and Rita Kimber. New York: Fromm International
Publishing Corporation, 1984.
A Work about Alfred Döblin
Dollenmayer, David. The Berlin Novels of Alfred
Döblin. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988.
Donoso, José (1924–1997) novelist,
short-story writer, poet
José Donoso was born to Dr. José Donoso and Ali-
cia Yáñez in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. Educated
by private teachers as a young child, he later at-
tended the prestigious Grange School. Donoso was
inspired to write at an early age by uncles who were
authors, as well as by the novels of such writers as
Jules VERNE
and Alexandre
DUMAS. After dropping
out of school and working for some time on a
sheep farm, he completed his education at Prince-
ton University, where he published his first short
stories, in English.
It was not until Donoso’s first novel, Corona-
tion, was released in 1957 that his work began to
receive serious critical attention. The least experi-
mental of his novels, it relates the transformation
of the conservative, middle-class Andrés, as he is
drawn out of his orderly, sterile existence and into
the realm of obsession and desire. In Coronation,
the most important themes of Donoso’s fiction are
already present: insanity, the complex nature of
identity, and the conflict between the demands of
instincts and the expectations of society. These
same themes are central to The Obscene Bird of
Night (1970), which represents Donoso’s best-
known and perhaps most mature work. This book
tells the story of the decline of an aristocratic
122 Döblin, Alfred
family, as seen through the eyes of Humberto
Peñaloza, the private teacher of the family’s last
offspring. The plot is not presented in any kind of
logical sequence, as the disorder of Peñaloza’s nar-
rative is intended to reflect the narrator’s psychic
instability and to question traditional notions of
time, space, and reality.
Donoso is a difficult writer to categorize in
Latin American and Chilean literature. Although
the unorthodox structure of his novels connect
them to the phenomenon known as the Boom (a
movement in Latin-American fiction involving
such authors as Gabriel GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ and Car-
los FUENTES, who employed experimental narrative
techniques in their novels and stories), the domes-
tic settings of his works tie them to the realist tra-
dition.
Donoso has received such recognition for his
fiction as the Chilean National Prize for Literature
and the William Faulkner Foundation Prize. His
stories and novels have been translated into many
languages and adapted for film and theater. His
work has exercised a critical influence on Spanish-
language fiction and represents one of the most
varied and compelling attempts to come to terms
with the complex history and sociology of Latin
America.
Another Work by José Donoso
A House in the Country. Translated by David
Pritchard. New York: Knopf, 1984.
A Work about José Donoso
Magnarelli, Sharon. Understanding José Donoso. Co-
lumbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich
(1821–1881) novelist, short-story writer
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was born in
Moscow, Russia, to Mikhay Dostoyevsky, an army
surgeon, and Maria Nechaeva, a daughter of a
prominent Moscow merchant. Dostoyevsky had a
traumatic childhood. His father was an alcoholic
and constantly terrorized the family. When Dos-
toyevsky was only nine years old, his best friend
was raped and murdered, a tragic incident he re-
membered throughout his life. In 1834 Dos-
toyevsky entered a prestigious private school in
Moscow, where he concentrated on literary stud-
ies. He made very few friends and spent most of his
time reading. He particularly admired the works of
Aleksandr
PUSHKIN and Nikolai KARAMZIN.
At the insistence of his father, Dostoyevsky en-
rolled in a school for military engineers in St. Pe-
tersburg in 1837. That same year, Dostoyevsky’s
studies were briefly interrupted by the death of his
mother. In 1839, his father died; it was rumored
that he had been murdered by his own serfs. Both
events had a deep impact on Dostoyevsky and later
reemerged in his novels.
On completion of his studies in 1845, Dos-
toyevsky briefly entered the civil service as an engi-
neer but resigned after only a few months to
pursue writing. The publication of Poor Folk in
1846 immediately gained critical attention,
launching his literary career.
Fascinated with French social philosophy, Dos-
toyevsky began to attend meetings of a radical,
utopian group. This group included several promi-
nent figures, mostly artists and intellectuals who
were interested in the reformation of Russian so-
ciety. In 1849, 39 members, including Dostoyevsky,
were arrested by the police. After months of inter-
rogation and torture (three members of the group
were confined to an insane asylum after their re-
lease), Dostoyevsky and other members of the
group were sentenced to death. Minutes before the
execution, however, Dostoyevsky was pardoned
and his sentence reduced to five years of hard labor
in Siberia.
The period of exile was perhaps the most cru-
cial experience in Dostoyevsky’s life. Spiritually
and mentally distraught, Dostoyevsky passionately
embraced the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox
Church. Deeply affected by his experience as a
prisoner, Dostoyevsky became politically reac-
tionary and a staunch supporter of the czar.
As a result, Dostoyevsky was allowed to return
to St. Petersburg in 1857, but his exile had taken
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich 123
its toll. He developed epilepsy, and his physical
health was very fragile. Along with his brother
Mikhail, Dostoyevsky began to edit Times, a
literary journal that serialized a number of
Dostoyevsky’s early novels. Among works pub-
lished during the early 1860s was The House of the
Dead (1862), a fictional account of prison life
based on Dostoyevsky’s experiences in Siberia, and
The Insulted and Injured (1861), a novel that ana-
lyzes the shortcomings of naïve utopianism.
Dostoyevsky married Maria Isaev in 1857, but
she died in the early 1860s, as did his brother. In
1862, Dostoyevsky left Russia to tour Europe,
where he was introduced to gambling, especially
roulette, which became an irresistible passion.
Gambling compounded his financial troubles, and
he returned to Russia in 1864 virtually penniless.
Dostoyevsky examined the psychological implica-
tions of gambling in his fascinating novel The
Gambler (1866).
In 1866, Dostoyevsky began working on Crime
and Punishment, which—harried by debt and des-
perately in need of money—he completed in a
month with the help of a stenographer, Anna
Snitkina. Dostoyevsky and Snitkina were married
in 1867. With his epilepsy and obsessions, Dos-
toyevsky was not the easiest of companions, but
the intimacy and love between Dostoyevsky and
his wife sustained them for the rest of their lives.
The couple traveled extensively throughout Eu-
rope but once again had to return to Russia in 1871
because of financial troubles caused by Dos-
toyevsky’s gambling.
Critical Analysis
Dostoyevsky’s fiction is notable for its deep and in-
tense understanding of human psychology. In
Notes from the Underground (1864), Dostoyevsky
began his literary experiments with the human
psyche through a detailed account of neurotic de-
mentia. In the novel, a minor government official
describes his hatred of the society he sees from his
“underground”viewpoint. The novel also explores
the spiritual conflict between the individual and
society. It is also a reaction against the optimistic
rationalism of
CHERNYSHEVSKY’s What Is to Be
Done?.
In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky por-
trays the spiritual and philosophical struggle of
Raskolnikov, a young student who murders a
pawnbroker. The novel explores the themes of
spiritual suffering, psychosis, and redemption, set
against the dark, nauseating background of the
slums of St. Petersburg. Dostoyevsky examines
the terms of formation of philosophical concepts
and their subsequent effect on the individual.
Many critics consider Crime and Punishment to
be the most seminal psychological drama in lit-
erary history.
The Idiot (1868) is an indictment of the mate-
rialism of the governing classes of Russia. In this
striking, realistic portrayal of 19th-century Russian
society, Dostoyevsky juxtaposes the ethical ideal-
ism of a young man against the crass materialism
of the drawing rooms of the middle class. The
novel amplifies the growing spiritual unrest of
Russian society that attempts to emulate the ma-
terial values of Western Europe. Dostoyevsky de-
nounces the society in which moral idealism is
labeled as mental incompetence. The Idiot marks
the growing philosophical crises of the realist liter-
ature of 19th-century Russia.Yet, though he saw so
clearly the flaws in the society that surrounded
him, Dostoyevsky denounced political violence
and extremism as a way to reform society.
In The Possessed (1871), Dostoyevsky com-
ments upon the responsibility of an individual in
social matters. The story is about Stavrogin, a
charismatic intellectual and atheist, who attracts a
group of fanatics who wreak havoc on a small
provincial town. It was based on the life of a revo-
lutionary named Sergey Nechayev but may have
reminded readers of several radical movements
that were current at the time. The Possessed was
ambivalently received in Russia: With its unflat-
tering picture of political activism, it was hailed as
a masterpiece by conservatives, while revolution-
ary circles denounced it as reactionary.
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) was Dos-
toyevsky’s last and arguably finest novel. As a
124 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich
pioneering work in psychological realism, the
novel engages a number of powerful themes: love,
hate, patricide, and the search for God, to name a
few. The Brothers Karamzov follows the destiny of
Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons. The most
famous chapter of the novel, “The Legend of the
Grand Inquisitor,” dramatizes the inner struggle
between heart and mind in the context of religion.
The profound psychological and social implications
of the plot assured the everlasting significance of
the novel, which was hailed as a great masterpiece
virtually from its first publication.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky received unprecedented
critical acclaim during the last years of his life. He
finally achieved financial solvency and turned his
attention to family life. After his death, his widow
and children were given a government pension by
the czar. Dostoyevsky’s funeral was attended by
thousands of people. He was hailed as a literary ge-
nius, the father of Russian
REALISM, and a master of
psychological realism. The contribution of Feyo-
dor Dostoyevsky to world literature is almost im-
measurable, as his works transformed entire
generations of writers and created new dimensions
in the world of fiction.
Other Works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Best Short Stories of Dostoyevsky. Translated by
David Magarshack. New York: Modern Library,
1992.
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Translated by
Kyril Fitzlyon. London: Quartet Books, 1986.
Works about Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Amoia, Alba della Fazia. Feodor Dostoevsky. New York:
Continuum Press, 1993.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt,
1821–1849. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1976.
———. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984.
———. Dostoevsky: The Years of Liberation,
1860–1865. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1986.
———. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years,
1865–1871. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1996.
———. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet,
1871–1881. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2002.
Leatherborrow, William J. Feodor Dostoevsky: A Refer-
ence Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
Du, Nguyen
See NGUYEN DU.
Ducasse, Isadore-Lucien
See LAUTRÉAMONT, COMTE DE.
Dudintsev, Vladimir Dmitrievich
(1918–1998) novelist
Vladimir Dudintsev was born in Kupyansk,
Ukraine. After his graduation from the Moscow
Law Institute, Dudintsev briefly served in the So-
viet army at the outbreak of World War II. Al-
though he wrote a number of short works during
the Stalinist era, most of them, as Dudintsev later
admitted, were lackluster and mediocre. His real
publishing debut came in 1956 with the publica-
tion of the novel Not by Bread Alone.
Not by Bread Alone tells the story of Lopatkin, a
brilliant inventor who was hindered by govern-
ment red tape. In the West, the novel was hailed
for its candid portrayal of negative aspects of the
Soviet Union. The work was harshly criticized at
a notorious 1957 meeting of the Soviet Writers’
Union. (That meeting became the topic of a poem
by Yevgeny
YEVTUSHENKO, “Again a Meeting”:
“Again a meeting, noisy, dying / half colloquium /
half co-lying . . .” —translation by Albert C. Todd.)
For a long period of time, he was shunned by most
of the “official” Soviet writers. Dudintsev found
ready support for his work among the political
dissidents, but he encountered enormous difficul-
ties publishing in the Soviet Union. His second
work, A New Year’s Fairy Tale (1957), was a sci-
Dudintsev, Vladimir Dmitrievich 125
ence-fiction novel set in a Soviet Union of the
future.
Dudintsev published his final novel, White
Clothes, in 1987 at the height of the perestroika
movement. White Clothes once again criticized
government corruption and endless circles of bu-
reaucracy. He also blamed a number of careless,
greedy government officials for the environmental
disasters in Russia. The novel was widely read and
hailed as a work of great social significance.
When Dudintsev died in 1998, he was consid-
ered one of the best writers of the Soviet era. He
often took great personal risks to expose the social
problems of the Soviet Union, and his well-crafted
prose is much admired.
Another Work by Vladimir Dudintsev
A New Year’s Fairy Tale. In Robert Magidoff, ed., Russ-
ian Science Fiction: An Anthology. Translated by
Doris Johnson. New York: New York University
Press, 1964.
Dupin, Amandine-Aurore-Lucile
See SAND, GEORGE.
Duras, Claire de (ca. 1777–1828) novelist
Claire de Duras was born to a French noble fam-
ily. Her father, a count, was a member of the liberal
French aristocracy. A supporter of radical ideas,
he was executed for failing to support the execu-
tion of Louis XVI. After her father’s death, de
Duras fled with her mother to the United States
where they spent some time in Philadelphia, Penn-
sylvania, with family. She also took a journey to
Martinique to receive an inheritance. In both
America and Martinique, she saw the realities of
slavery. They then traveled to Switzerland and to
London, where de Duras met her future husband,
Amédée-Bretagne-Malo de Durfort, the duke of
Durfort and the future duke of Duras. They were
married in 1797.
In 1808, de Duras moved to France with her
husband where, as a result of changes brought
about by the Restoration, he became an active
member of the court in 1814. While her husband
was busy with his duties, de Duras held gatherings
of thinkers, poets, and intellectuals who discussed
their thoughts and ideas about the unjustness of
life. It was during these meetings that de Duras
began to relate the story of a Senegalese girl, res-
cued from slavery by a French aristocratic family,
whose life of privilege does not protect her from
the alienation of racism. The story became popu-
lar in the group, and de Duras was encouraged to
write it down. This became her first novel, Ourika
(1823).
Initially published anonymously, Ourika grew
to become a national obsession. The work opposed
the prevailing attitude that slavery was a natural
thing and denounced it as an evil institution. The
work was also unique in that the narrator was a
black woman, which was almost unheard of in
French literature at this time. As John Fowles says
in the introduction to his translation, it is “the first
serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black
mind.”
In 1822, de Duras became sick and depressed.
She withdrew to her country house, where she
wrote two more novels on the subjects of sex and
class: Olivier (1822) and the epistolary novel
Edouard (1825), both of which feature gentle he-
roes with feminine characteristics. She was never
interested in writing for money or fame; instead,
she hoped that her works would promote change.
Only after her death did her works and their frank
depiction of social concerns begin to gain recog-
nition.
Another Work by Claire de Duras
Ourika: An English Translation. Translated by John
Fowles. New York: Modern Language Association
of America, 1995.
Works about Claire de Duras
Crichfield, Grant. Three Novels of Madame de Duras.
The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
Kadish, Doris Y., and Françoise Massardier-Kenney,
eds. Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French
126 Dupin, Amandine-Aurore-Lucile
Women’s Writing, 1783–1823. Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1994.
Duras, Marguerite (1914–1996) novelist,
playwright, screenwriter
Born Marguerite Donnadieu in Gia Dinh, In-
dochina, the area which is now Vietnam, she took
her pseudonym, Duras, from the name of a French
village near where her father had once owned land.
Her father died when Duras was only four years
old, and her mother, a teacher, struggled to sup-
port her three children on her own. Duras spent
most of her childhood in Indochina and, when she
was still a teenager, had an affair with a wealthy
Chinese man. She returns to this period of life re-
peatedly in her novels.
When Duras was 17, she moved to France to
study law and political science at the Sorbonne.
After graduating in 1935, she went to work as a
secretary at the Ministry of Colonies. In 1939, she
married Robert Antelme. With the arrival of World
War II, she became a member of the French Resis-
tance. Antelme became a Resistance leader and was
captured and imprisoned. He survived Buchen-
wald, Gandersheim, and Dachau. After his release,
Duras, who had been planning to leave him before
his capture, nursed him back to health, living with
him in a ménage à trois with Dionys Mascolo. She
joined the Communist Party in that period but in
1950, after the Prague Uprising, was expelled for
revisionism.
Duras published her first novel, Les Impudents
(1942), in a style greatly influenced by American
author Ernest Hemingway. She gained the most
recognition, however, during the 1950s with her
novels Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea
Wall, 1950) about an impoverished family living
in Indochina, and the psychological romance
novel Le Marin de Gibralter (The Sailor from
Gibraltar, 1952). Her novel Le Square (1955)
earned her both respect as an author and associa-
tion with what was known as the NEW NOVEL
group. However, in her next novel, Moderato
Cantabile (1958), Duras shifts her writing style
from traditional topics and themes to what would
become her prevailing themes of death, memory,
sexual desire, and love.
Toward the end of the 1950s, Duras turned her
attention to writing screenplays. The film for
which she is best known internationally is Hi-
roshima, Mon Amour (1959). Directed by Alain
Resnais, the film focuses on the theme of compli-
cations arising from the love between two people
who have experienced the trauma of war. It tells of
the brief love affair between Emmanuelle Riva, a
married French actress, and Eija Okada, a Japanese
architect, during which Riva tells Okada of her for-
bidden love affair with a German soldier and her
subsequent mental breakdown. Innovative in its
use of flashbacks and montages, the film received
mixed reviews. It earned an Academy Award nom-
ination for best screenplay but failed miserably in
the box offices in Japan.
Duras’s work became increasingly experimental
in the 1960s, especially after the 1968 student re-
volts. She became interested in the power of lan-
guage, memories, and alienation. Feminist critics
tie her shift in style directly to the concept of fem-
inine writing with its increasing sparseness and
suggestiveness. Love, for Duras’s characters, be-
comes an escape that is often linked with alcohol
and madness.
In the 1970s, Duras continued to focus on writ-
ing screenplays, including the film Camion (1982)
with French actor Gérard Depardieu. She returned
to the novel format in the 1980s with the semiau-
tobiographical The Lover (1984), for which she won
France’s most cherished literary honor, the Prix
Goncourt. The novel, made into a film by the same
name in 1992, focuses on the sexual initiation of a
young girl in Indochina. Duras’s works were often
associated with events in her life. Her collection of
short stories La Doleur (1985) was based on her re-
lationship with Antelme and Mascolo.
In 1980, Duras met Yann Andréa Steiner. The
two lived together until Duras’s death. Duras’s cre-
ativity during this period was often shadowed by
her increasing abuse of alcohol. In Practicalities
(1987), she wrote about her relationship with
Duras, Marguerite 127