Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey

Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey PDF

Author: Robin Feuer Miller

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 030012015X

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How does Dostoevsky’s fiction illuminate questions that are important to us today? What does the author have to say about memory and invention, the nature of evidence, and why we read? How did his readings of such writers as Rousseau, Maturin, and Dickens filter into his own novelistic consciousness? And what happens to a novel like Crime and Punishment when it is the subject of a classroom discussion or a conversation? In this original and wide-ranging book, Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller approaches the author’s major works from a variety of angles and offers a new set of keys to understanding Dostoevsky’s world. Taking Dostoevsky’s own conversion as her point of departure, Miller explores themes of conversion and healing in his fiction, where spiritual and artistic transfigurations abound. She also addresses questions of literary influence, intertextuality, and the potency of what the author termed "ideas in the air.” For readers new to Dostoevsky’s writings as well as those deeply familiar with them, Miller offers lucid insights into his works and into their continuing power to engage readers in our own times.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self PDF

Author: Yuri Corrigan

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2017-10-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 081013571X

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Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche. Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky PDF

Author: Joseph Frank

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-10-19

Total Pages: 984

ISBN-13: 1400833418

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A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works—from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov PDF

Author: Robin Feuer Miller

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0300151721

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Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel— The Brothers Karamazov—in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today “remains harrowingly alive in the face of our present day worries, paradoxes, and joys,” observes Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller. In this engaging and original book, she guides us through the complexities of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, offering keen insights and a celebration of the author’s unparalleled powers of imagination. Miller’s critical companion to The Brothers Karamazov explores the novel’s structure, themes, characters, and artistic strategies while illuminating its myriad philosophical and narrative riddles. She discusses the historical significance of the book and its initial reception, and in a new preface discusses the latest scholarship on Dostoevsky and the novel that crowned his career.

Russia's Capitalist Realism

Russia's Capitalist Realism PDF

Author: Vadim Shneyder

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0810142481

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Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‐century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.

Dostoevsky at 200

Dostoevsky at 200 PDF

Author: Katherine Bowers

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1487508638

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Reconsidering Dostoevsky's legacy 200 years after his birth, this collection addresses how and why his novels contribute so much to what we think of as the modern condition.

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment PDF

Author: Robert Guay

Publisher: Oxford Studies in Philosophy a

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190464011

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"This volume brings together philosophers and literary scholars to explore the ways that Crime and Punishment engages with philosophical reflection. The seven essays treat a diversity of topics, including: self-knowledge and the nature of mind, emotions, agency, freedom, the family, the authority of law and morality, and the self"--

Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism

Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism PDF

Author: Paul J. Contino

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-08-17

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1725250748

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In this book Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel, and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha’s mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility “to all, for all” develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader’s guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a “monk in the world,” and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha’s brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya’s struggle to become a “new man” and Ivan’s anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha’s generative role with the young people he encounters, and his final message of hope.

Dostoevsky: A Very Short Introduction

Dostoevsky: A Very Short Introduction PDF

Author: Deborah Martinsen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-28

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0192609912

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Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Fyodor Dostoevsky became the writer best known for his treatment of the big questions of ethics, religion, and philosophy. In this Very Short Introduction, Deborah Martinsen explores Dostoevsky's tumultuous life story: his political imprisonment and narrow escape from execution, his Siberian exile, his gambling addiction, his romantic marriage, and his literary success. Martinsen also delves into his major works - Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, The Diary of a Writer, and more. Each chapter analyzes a key theme or aspect of Dostoevsky's writing that showcases his profound insights into human nature and society: doubling, freedom, shame, social justice, scandal, aesthetics, ethics, faith, and the eternal questions. Martinsen also demonstrates how Dostoevsky's novels remain relevant today as they address pressing questions about freedom, morality, and meaning in a complex world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky

Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky PDF

Author: William Peter van den Bercken

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 0857289764

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This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Dostoevsky's ambiguous treatment of religious issues in his literary works strongly differs from the slavophile Orthodoxy of his journalistic writings. In the novels Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems. This study is based on a balanced method of literary analysis and theological evaluation of the texts, avoiding free theological association as well as hermeneutical mixing with the non-literary writings of Dostoevsky. The study starts by discussing the main recent studies of Dostoevsky's religion. It then describes Dostoevsky's original literary method in dealing with religious issues - his use of paradoxes, contradictions and irony. 'Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky' ultimately deconstructs Dostoevsky as an Orthodox writer, and reveals that the Christian themes in his novels are not ecclesiastical or confessionally theological ones, but instead are expressions of a fundamentally Christian anthropology and biblical ethics.