Authors

Discussion

There have already been extensive studies of how, in part due to his own personal experience with epilepsy, Dostoevsky looked far more favorably on disability than other writers. However, there has been far less exploration of his poetics of disability outside of the specific instances of epilepsy. In this presentation, I look at Dostoevsky’s descriptions of disability to consider a number of relevant questions that have been raised by the field of disability studies. Namely, does the author distinguish between intellectual and non-intellectual disability, does he privilege those with intellectual disabilities versus those with physical disability; does the author make the disabled body seen, does he foreground it, or are there also instances in which he removes disability from the public square; does Dostoevsky condemn instances of societal ableism; and finally, is there an element of intersectional prejudice in the context of disability for Dostoevsky – do disabled women fare better or worse than men? Some of the sexual violence (Brothers Karamazov) or imagined sexual violence (Demons) toward disabled women suggests some awareness on Dostoevsky’s part that disabled women had greater barriers and struggled more within the ableist bounds of society than disabled men did.