''Man is mystery, '' Dostoevsky writes, ''The mystery must be solved, and

''Man is mystery, '' Dostoevsky writes, ''The mystery must be solved, and even if you spend your whole life attempting to solve it, do not say you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man. '' Dostoevsky's immense and chaotic novels are his attempt to understand this mystery through his life, through writing. Remarkable in comparison to many other great Russian writers, he did not create caricatures of people and did not invent fanciful situations in order to apprehend truths, but sank himself deeply into his existence--its perils and emotions, failures and successes, with a far greater sense of reality--describing men and women as they are. He was engaging a real struggle between a real Christ and a real nihilism. The diaries are the place of his ruminations, where he connects the mind that is utterly free in the construction of the worlds of his fiction, to everyday occurrences, the lives of friends and family, fellow writers and artists, his emotions, and thousands of drafts of writing. Here is Dostoevsky in all his complexity, puzzling out, agonizing over what must be said, annotated by Kenneth Lantz. Volume 1 of 2, 334 pp.