Dubliners (2 of 4), The Call of the Wild & Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Omsk, Alaska and Llareggub
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s fortune-telling saucer you will find:
Some background on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, before our read-along of The Brothers Karamazov next year;
The announcement of our monthly read-along for January;
Birthday greetings to Gustave Flaubert;
A new Penguin Classics edition of Under Milk Wood;
A preview of coming attractions, including a letter to Father Christmas;
And our second discussion of James Joyce’s Dubliners – with a note on Halloween games.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
I’m very much looking forward to reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov next year. We’ll start reading on Friday 2nd January – all the details are here.
In advance, here is a little background on Dostoyevsky.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was the son of a doctor. His mother died when he was fifteen and his father was murdered two years later.
In 1846 he published The Double, a dark fable about a timid government clerk who meets his doppelgänger. Vladimir Nabokov later called it a ‘perfect work of art’.
In 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested for his involvement in the ‘Petrashevsky Circle’, a banned-book reading group, and he was sentenced to death. At the very last minute, his sentence was commuted to hard labour in a Siberian prison camp at Omsk, where his hands and feet were kept constantly shackled – an experience he later recreated in The House of the Dead (1862). When he was eventually released in 1853, he was forced to serve in the Russian army for another six years.
He finally returned to St Petersburg in 1859 and spent the 1860s travelling around western Europe, writing the existentialist novella Notes from the Underground (1864) and the novel for which he is perhaps best remembered, Crime and Punishment (1866), the story of the nihilistic student Raskolnikov, who commits a hideous crime and becomes increasingly tormented by his own conscience.
In 1863 he became addicted to gambling in Baden-Baden. He dictated The Gambler in 1866 in order to pay off his own roulette debts.
He spent his last years on the move, publishing his serial Diary of a Writer, and writing his three late great novels: The Idiot (1868-9), Demons or The Possessed (1871-2) and his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80).
He died in February 1881 following a series of pulmonary haemorrhages, just three months after the final instalment of The Brothers Karamazov had been published.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Dostoevsky ‘the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn’.
I look forward to reading The Brothers Karamazov with you, starting on Friday 2 January.
January’s read-along – The Call of the Wild
This week I’m also delighted to be announcing our monthly read-along for January 2026. Please join me next month to read Jack London’s canine adventure story, The Call of the Wild.
The novelist E. L. Doctorow considered The Call of the Wild to be Jack London’s masterpiece. He called it ‘a novella in length and linearity, but a novel in feverish intention.’
What is it?
The Call of the Wild (1903) tells the story of Buck, a pet dog from California, who is stolen, captured and forced to work in the harsh, freezing cold Yukon territory, during the 1897 Gold Rush. It’s a classic adventure story, in which Buck gradually learns how to survive in the icy wilderness of the far North.
Why are we reading it?
The Call of the Wild has never been out of print since it was first published in 1903. It’s the perfect read for chilly winter’s evenings – and a bracing outdoorsy start to the new year. It’s often published as a children’s novel, perhaps because it has an exciting plot and the principal character is an animal, but there are depths to enjoy and discuss as an adult, not least Buck’s canine psychology and spirituality. As E. L. Doctorow said, the book is both a pulp-fiction adventure novel and a ‘mythopoetic thesis’.
Which edition should I read?
Jack London’s books are out of copyright, so there are lots of editions to choose from, including free versions of the text online, like this one.
I plan to read this slim Penguin English Library edition, with a beautiful cover by Coralie Bickford-Smith.
But if you would prefer more annotations and commentary, I might recommend the Oxford World’s Classics edition – with notes by Earle Labor and Robert C. Leitz, III – which also includes White Fang (1906), a mirror narrative that London conceived as the ‘complete antithesis’ of The Call of the Wild.
How will we read it?
The Call of the Wild is a breezy 88 pages (in my edition) and contains seven chapters.
I suggest we read it over two weeks:
We’ll start reading on Friday 9th January.
On Friday 16th January we’ll discuss Chapters 1-4;
And on Friday 23rd January we’ll discuss Chapters 5-7.
Then, if you’re near London, you’d be very welcome to book a ticket for our discussion of The Call of the Wild at the Hatchards Classics Book Club on Thursday 5th February.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but afterwards I post a report of our discussion here on Substack.
Our weekly read-along discussions of The Call of the Wild will be for paid subscribers only. More details here.
If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
If you buy a copy of The Call of the Wild through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US), Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
Happy Birthday Flaubert
In other news, today was Gustave Flaubert’s birthday.
Flaubert was the son of a doctor. He studied law in Paris but confessed himself ‘disgusted with life’ and was quite content when an unspecified nervous disease forced him to retire to Croisset, near Rouen, where he spent much of the rest of his life writing. He never married nor had any children, wishing to ‘transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence’.
His novels and plays were critically unsuccessful during his lifetime, but he is now considered one of the greatest French writers of the nineteenth century and a leading exponent of Realism. He saw his writing career as a continual quest for ‘le mot juste’.
His masterpiece, and the book for which he is best remembered, is Madame Bovary.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857)
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition | 384 pages | translated by Lydia Davis
What’s new this week?
December is always a quiet month for classics reissues. The only new classic published yesterday was a Penguin Classics edition of Dylan Thomas’s beloved radio play, Under Milk Wood. Thomas’s copyright expired last year, so there have been several new editions of Under Milk Wood published recently.
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas (1954)
In the Welsh seaside town of Llareggub, night is moving in the streets. Its inhabitants are lost in the land of dreams: old Captain Cat catches up with his drowned shipmates, Mog Edwards the draper is consumed by mad love for Miss Price the dressmaker, and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard whips the ghosts of her two late husbands into shape. As the sun rises, the ‘dismays and rainbows’ of each character are played out within the cycle of one day, intertwining voices and lives, dreams and reality. By turns tender, hilarious and beautifully lyrical, Dylan Thomas’s ‘play for voices’ is his most beloved work and a landmark of Welsh literature.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 144 pages | introduced by Nerys Williams
Incidentally, this isn’t the first edition of Under Milk Wood published by Penguin: it was a Penguin Modern Classic for some years in the early 2000s.
The very best way to experience Under Milk Wood, of course, is as a ‘play for voices’, the format for which it was originally conceived and written. Here is the BBC unabridged recording from 1963, featuring Richard Burton’s resonant narration.
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
And now here’s a letter to Father Christmas.
Dear Father Christmas,
As you’re making your list at the moment – and checking it twice – may I please recommend the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription for all the classics readers in girl and boy land?
Nice (and naughty) folk can receive all the books we read here each month on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and sleigh-delivered anywhere in the world – as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so they can choose to read along with us, if they wish.
To find out more, please ask your elves to follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk. Thank you!
Dubliners (2 of 4)
And finally, this week we’ve read five more stories from Dubliners by James Joyce – how is your heart faring? Here are my thoughts:
