II. Darwin’s Plots, Malthus’s Mighty Feast, Lamennais’s Motherless Fledglings, and Dostoevsky’s Lost Sheep

Abstract

Against the background of work by Gillian Beer, George Levine, and others on Darwin’s plots and evolutionary narrative in the English novel, what follows explores the relationship of Darwin’s plots to Dostoevsky’s.1 The concern is not with how Dostoevsky responded to Darwin as a scientist, for, in fact, as others have documented, Dostoevsky was receptive to Darwin’s science.2 Evolution as such was not a stumbling block. As Dostoevsky saw it, all that mattered was the breath of God—whether we come from a lump of clay, Adam’s rib, or monkeys was immaterial. What mattered was the freedom and responsibility instilled with that breath, given the possibility that, in Dostoevsky’s words, “through his sins,