Lesson plan
Bobok
.|right "Bobok" ( , Bobok) is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky that first appeared in 1873 in his self-published Diary of a Writer. The story consists largely of a dialogue between recently deceased occupants of graves in a cemetery, most of whom are fully conscious and retain all the features of their living personalities. The dialogue is overheard by a troubled writer who has lain down near the graves. The title "Bobok" refers to a nonsensical utterance repeatedly made by one of the cemetery's residents, an almost completely decomposed corpse who is otherwise silent. The writer also reports a kind of auditory hallucination of the word prior to his hearing of the dialogue. The sound suggests "little bean" in Russian, but in the context of the story is taken to be synonymous with gibberish. The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded Bobok as one of the finest works in the literary tradition of Menippean satire, and argues that it encapsulates many of the thematic concerns of Dostoevsky's major novels.
Article summary
.|right "Bobok" ( , Bobok) is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky that first appeared in 1873 in his self-published Diary of a Writer. The story consists largely of a dialogue between recently deceased occupants of graves in a cemetery, most of whom are fully conscious and retain all the features of their living personalities. The dialogue is overheard by a troubled writer who has lain down near the graves. The title "Bobok" refers to a nonsensical utterance repeatedly made by one of the cemetery's residents, an almost completely decomposed corpse who is otherwise silent. The writer also reports a kind of auditory hallucination of the word prior to his hearing of the dialogue. The sound suggests "little bean" in Russian, but in the context of the story is taken to be synonymous with gibberish. The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded Bobok as one of the finest works in the literary tradition of Menippean satire, and argues that it encapsulates many of the thematic concerns of Dostoevsky's major novels.
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