Romantic Literary Confessions

Dostoevsky's unfinished early novel Netochka Nezvanova reflect the young author's view of literature as a kind of metaphorical enchantment. About three decades after E.T.A. Hoffmann invents the magic library of Archivist Lindhorst as a portal to the poetic realm in "Der goldne Topf" (1814), Fyodor Dostoevsky constructs another library, grounded in a far less phantasmic dimension but marked by an equally hypnotic propensity. In Dostoevsky's library, a young girl, the eponymous narrator of the novel, finds refuge from the hardships of her orphaned life. Unlike Anselmus who becomes entranced in the process of copying mysterious manuscripts in Hoffmann's fairy-tale (310), Netochka is spellbound by reading.