The Crocodile by Fyodor Dostoevsky

NB: I'm unsure about when and where to best hold these monthly short reading meetings. For now, I'll post them at Common Theory for Saturday mornings. If you'd like to suggest an alternative time or venue, please do so in the comments section below.

Our short reading for March will be the classic short story "The Crocodile" by Fyodor Dostoevsky,

About the story: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Crocodile” (1865) is one of his more unusual shorter works, yet it occupies an interesting place in the development of nineteenth-century European satire. Written during a period when Dostoevsky was increasingly engaged with questions about the role of the intelligentsia and the direction of Russian society, the story demonstrates his ability to adapt comic and even farcical material to serious literary ends. Rather than merely entertaining, the piece experiments with tone and form, anticipating later modernist strategies in which the absurd becomes a vehicle for social and philosophical reflection.
Literarily, the story is often noted for how it extends the possibilities of prose fiction beyond realism while still remaining grounded in recognizable social settings. Dostoevsky uses exaggeration and irony to expose the vanity, abstraction, and self-importance of the educated classes—concerns that recur, in more tragic registers, in his later major novels. In this sense, “The Crocodile” is valuable not simply as a curiosity, but as part of the continuum of his artistic development.
For readers interested in the evolution of satire and the boundaries of the realistic tradition, the story offers a compact case study. It invites reflection on how literary seriousness can coexist with humor, and how the absurd can become a legitimate mode of cultural critique. (Source: Chat GPT)