Don’t Read Dostoyevsky?

A letter to the New York Times:

Cathleen Schine’s essay “I Was a Teenage Illiterate” (Feb. 28) reminds me of a letter that Dostoyevsky wrote at the end of his life to a father concerned over his daughter’s reading (Aug. 18, 1880). As a 12-year-old, Dostoyevsky had enjoyed reading “all of Walter Scott,” and he recommends the father cultivate the child’s “fantasy” properly. Next, “she should read all of Dickens without exception.” And while he recommends everything by such other Russian writers as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Goncharov, he adds, “I don’t think that all my works would be suitable for her.”