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Dead Writers Club

Dead Writers Club

By: Dead Writers Club
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The greatest novels ever written already solved your problems. You just haven't read them yet.


Dead Writers Club is a podcast about the greatest novels ever written and why they still matter. Not as literary achievements to admire from a distance. As tools. Tools for understanding what it means to be anxious, or purposeless, or lonely, or in love, or afraid of dying.


Every episode takes one classic work and asks a single question: what does this book understand about modern life that we have forgotten?


We've covered Dostoevsky on guilt and anxiety. Camus on the one line everyone quotes and almost nobody understands. Kafka on conditional love inside families. Orwell on what actually happens to a person when language is taken away. Virginia Woolf on the self you left behind.


No academic jargon. No reading list pressure. No assumption that you've read any of these books before. Just the ideas, made genuinely accessible — the way a knowledgeable friend would explain them, not the way a university lecture would.


New episodes every week.


Topics: classic literature · literary analysis · books explained · Dostoevsky · Tolstoy · Camus · Kafka · Orwell · Virginia Woolf · reading classics · philosophy through fiction · what great novels teach us · anxiety · identity · meaning · purpose

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mo Sjöberg Orsini
Episodes
  • Why Dostoevsky Understood Your Anxiety Better Than Therapy | Crime and Punishment

    Why Dostoevsky Understood Your Anxiety Better Than Therapy | Crime and Punishment
    May 26 2026

    There is a specific kind of suffering nobody talks about honestly. It keeps you awake at three in the morning reviewing conversations from six years ago. It makes you feel like someone is about to knock on your door and ask you to account for yourself. Psychologists call parts of it anxiety. Parts of it guilt. In 1866, Dostoevsky described its interior more accurately than almost any therapist has managed since.


    This is not an episode about a Russian novel. It is an episode about what guilt actually does inside a human being — and why some anxiety is not a disorder, but a signal.


    In this episode:

    — The problem: the gap between what you have done and who you thought you were

    — The man: mock execution, Siberia, gambling, debt — why Dostoevsky wrote from inside suffering, not above it

    — The novel: what Crime and Punishment is really about (not the crime)

    — The insight: why Raskolnikov's collapse reveals something true about your own mind

    — The resolution: why confession matters — not religiously, but psychologically


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    MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

    → Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky — listen on Audible: [YOUR AUDIBLE AFFILIATE LINK]

    → The Brothers Karamazov — coming later this season


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    ABOUT DEAD WRITERS CLUB

    Classic literature made genuinely accessible. Every episode takes one great novel and asks: what does this book understand about modern life that we have forgotten? New episodes every week.


    Keywords: Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, anxiety and guilt, classic literature, literary analysis, Russian literature, Raskolnikov, books explained, what great novels teach us, philosophy through fiction

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    19 mins
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