Dostoevsky's Democracy
Dostoevsky's Democracy

Author: Nancy Ruttenburg

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-01-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1400828929

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Dostoevsky's Democracy offers a major reinterpretation of the life and work of the great Russian writer by closely reexamining the crucial transitional period between the early works of the 1840s and the important novels of the 1860s. Sentenced to death in 1849 for utopian socialist political activity, the 28-year-old Dostoevsky was subjected to a mock execution and then exiled to Siberia for a decade, including four years in a forced labor camp, where he experienced a crisis of belief. It has been influentially argued that the result of this crisis was a conversion to Russian Orthodoxy and reactionary politics. But Dostoevsky's Democracy challenges this view through a close investigation of Dostoevsky's Siberian decade and its most important work, the autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1861). Nancy Ruttenburg argues that Dostoevsky's crisis was set off by his encounter with common Russians in the labor camp, an experience that led to an intense artistic meditation on what he would call Russian "democratism." By tracing the effects of this crisis, Dostoevsky's Democracy presents a new understanding of Dostoevsky's aesthetic and political development and his role in shaping Russian modernity itself, especially in relation to the preeminent political event of his time, peasant emancipation.

Conversations with Dostoevsky
Conversations with Dostoevsky

Author: George Pattison

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-14

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0198881568

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Conversations with Dostoevsky presents a series of fictional conversations taking place between November 2018 and Spring 2019 in the narrator's Glasgow apartment and elsewhere in the city. At the beginning of the conversations, the narrator has been reading Dostoevsky's story A Gentle Spirit, which concludes with a dramatic statement of protest atheism. This statement suggests that love is not possible in a purely mechanical universe in which all living beings are condemned to death and ultimate extinction. The conversations spell out Dostoevsky's response to this view and his advocacy of faith in God, Christ, and immortality. The themes discussed include suicide, truth and lies, guilt, determinism, literature, the Bible, Mary, Christ, Dostoevsky and film, 'the woman question', nationalism, war, the Church, the Jewish question, immortality, and God. In addition to conversations between the narrator and Dostoevsky, we drop in on a dinner party at which Dostoevsky is discussed from various points of view and in another conversation Dostoevsky is joined by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov to discuss nationalism, the Church, and life. We also attend a seminar on 'Dostoevsky, Anti-Semitism, and Nazism', and visit Glasgow's Necropolis on Easter Eve. The conversations in the first part of the volume are accompanied by a series of commentaries in a second part, which contextualize the issues discussed in the conversations with references to his novels, journalism, letters, and notebooks as well as engaging the relevant critical literature.

Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being
Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being

Author: Paul Fung

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1351569295

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For Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), who lived with epileptic seizures for more than thirty years, illness is an ineradicable part of existence. Epilepsy in his writings denotes both a set of physical symptoms and a state of survival in which the protagonists incessantly try to articulate, theorize, or master what is ungraspable in their everyday experience. Their attempts to deal with what they cannot control or comprehend results in disappointment, or what Dostoevsky called a mystical terror. Dostoevsky's heroes are unable fully to understand this state, and their existence becomes 'epileptic' in so far as self-knowledge and self-coincidence are never achieved. Fung explores new critical pathways by reexamining five of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels. Drawing on insights from writers including Benjamin, Blanchot, Freud, Lacan and Nietzsche, the book takes epilepsy as a trope for discussing the unspeakable moments in the texts, and is intended for students and scholars who are interested in the subject of modernity, critique of the visual, and dialogues between philosophy and literature. Paul Fung is Assistant Professor in English at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong.

Wages of Evil
Wages of Evil

Author: Anna Schur

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0810128489

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Anna Schur incorporates sources from philosophy, criminology, psychology, and history to argue that Dostoevsky's thinking was shaped not only by his Christian ethics but also by the debates on punishment theory and practice unfolding during his lifetime.

Jacques Maritain and the Moral Foundation of Democracy
Jacques Maritain and the Moral Foundation of Democracy

Author: John DiJoseph

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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In this book, John DiJoseph probes the philosophical presuppositions that undergird Jacques Maritain's political theory, particularly his theory that democracy and Christianity are inexorably linked. Maritain's theory of democracy is particularly relevant today with the ascendancy of what Maritain called bourgeois liberal democracy in the United States and Western Europe; a type of democracy that Maritain thought would lead to the eventual demise of Western culture. In opposition to the bourgeois liberal democracy, Maritain posited a personalist democracy with a uniquely Christain soul. DiJoseph traces the historical and philosophical development of Maritain's debt to Henri Bergson and Alexis De Tocqueville and Maritain's break with classical Christian and Catholic political thought. The book will not only appeal to scholars of history and political science but also to those concerned with the current debate over the philosophical basis of democracy and the cultural decline of the West.

Dostoevsky in Love
Dostoevsky in Love

Author: Alex Christofi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-21

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1472964705

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'A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography' – Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: The Biography 'Anyone who loves [Dostoevsky's] novels will be fascinated by this book' – Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Dostoevsky's life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognised as among the finest ever written. In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the author's work with the historical context to form an illuminating and often surprising whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the reader in a grand vista of Dostoevsky's world: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsar's fortress to the refined salons of St Petersburg. Along the way, Christofi relates the stories of the three women whose lives were so deeply intertwined with Dostoevsky's: the consumptive widow Maria; the impetuous Polina who had visions of assassinating the Tsar; and the faithful stenographer Anna, who did so much to secure his literary legacy. Reading between the lines of his fiction, Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life – and literary stardom – not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.

Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky

Author: Joseph Frank

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2003-09-22

Total Pages: 806

ISBN-13: 9780691115696

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This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky details the last decade of the writer's life, a time that won him the universal approval towards which he always aspired.