Description: What makes characters seem real? This book explores the ways Tolstoy and Dostoevsky created the illusion of autonomous characters, through techniques that paradoxically hindered the writers' ambitions for the novel as a genre.
Review Quotes: "A profound and subtle engagement with the question of fictional character and an important, even path-breaking contribution to the theory of the novel. The book offers an incomparable vision of how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky stand, strangely, at both the Archimedean center and the outer boundary of the nineteenth-century novel--and thus of twentieth-century novel theory." --Alex Woloch, author of The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel