Nina Pelikan Straus explores Dostoevsky's major works with a focus on his women characters, his references to rape and men's abuse of females, and his construction of 'the feminine'. Intended not to impose feminist ideology upon the writer, but rather to enlarge feminist discourse through Dostoevsky, the chapters explore new readings with a sense of their positioning at the end of a century without subsuming the woman question within a larger frame. Dostoevsky and the Woman Question makes a unique contribution to the new, but growing, field of gender studies within Slavic studies.