SOURCE: LeBlanc, Ronald D. “An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores, and Cannibals in Dostoevsky's Fiction.” In Food in Russian History and Culture, edited by Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre, pp. 124-45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, LeBlanc explores Dostoevsky's use of food and eating in his fiction, and suggests that the author uses such imagery as a metaphor for humans' efforts to dominate, or “devour” each other.

We are what we all abhor, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not only of men, but of ourselves.

—Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.

—Galatians 5:15

In a rather fanciful American novel set in the late 1960s entitled The Abortion (1970), Richard Brautigan describes a public library in California that accepts books from its patrons...