David Stromberg

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar whose essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Entropy, Literary Matters, and Speculative Nonfiction, among others.

If Kirillov Had Drunk Coffee Instead of Tea

I first encountered Fyodor Dostoevsky through Alexei Nilych Kirillov, one of his characters in Demons—not in the novel itself, but in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, much of which grapples with the philosophical reasoning behind Kirillov’s decision to shoot himself. Camus counters that life’s absurdity