Dostoevsky / Karamazov as model — the DFW-side source of the archive's Karamazov-frame

echoes

Early text: Dostoevsky's characters "manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life" while staying "alive"; the "qualities we hate and fear" list — "sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism" (the list Jacobs reframes as the "devils" of our age); the self-recognition in "the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at". [e-text]
IJ echo: The reading (advanced fullest by Jacobs's dissertation Part Three) that IJ is patterned on The Brothers Karamazov — Orin/Dmitri, Hal/Ivan, Mario/Alyosha, the reason-vs-faith conflict. This essay is the primary DFW text that grounds that reading: Jacobs draws his "devils" list and his reason/faith → belief/rational-thought substitution directly from here. The essay documents Wallace's Dostoevsky immersion ("pretty much the whole last two months immersed in Dostoevskynalia") at the moment of IJ's publication.
Weight: documentary (authorial-source exhibit — see Notes)