When reading Luis Borges’ “Death and the Compass” I was immediately struck by the stylistic similarities to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s detective novels. Dostoyevsky, like Poe, was an early contributor to the genre writing several murder mysteries such as “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment.” Both Borges and Dostoyevsky use a similarly mysterious and cerebral tone as well as an active narrator who occasionally inserts himself into the narrative. For the comparison of the two authors, I wanted to look more at the narrative style of metafiction. In “Death and the Compass” the narrator adds external commentary towards the end of the short story creating a feeling of an anonymous witness or observer to the crime. Dostoyevsky employs a similar technique in his novel “The Brother’s Karamazov” where the reader is unaware that they have been reading a court disposition until almost the very end. In turn, the reader occasionally stumbles across the first person in a way that feels related to Borges’ approach to metafiction.

Borges seems to have been inspired by Dostoyevsky saying ” Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoevsky marks an important date in one’s life.” I think that the similarities between the authors lend to the similarities in their writing. Both were writing for a non-English speaker audience, who are often more widely associated with the detective fiction genre. Both men also lived under repressive governments and their literature was subject to scrutiny and in the case of Dostoyevsky, even exile. I think that maybe the detective fiction genre allowed both authors the ability to examine and comment on human nature, the state, and morality.