Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings

Dostoevsky's Occasional Writings

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1997-07-20

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0810114739

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A collection of articles, sketches, and letters spanning 33 years in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing career, from 1847, just after the successful publication of his first novel, until 1880, a year before his death. This volume allows the reader to measure the broad scope of his artistic development and the changes that occurred as a result of such cataclysmic events as Dostoevsky's arrest and trial for treason and his subsequent imprisonment and exile in Siberia.


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.


Memoirs from the House of the Dead

Memoirs from the House of the Dead

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780192838681

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In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante's Inferno. Terror and resignation - the rampages of a pyschopath, the brief serence interlude of Christmas Day - are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces.


Through the Russian Prism

Through the Russian Prism

Author: Joseph Frank

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780691014562

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Essays probe the culture that spawned the great novels of Dostoevsky and explore the author's influence on world literature.


An Accidental Family

An Accidental Family

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 652

ISBN-13:

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Set in the 1870s, a time of social disorder in Russia, An Accidental Family is the story of Arkady Dolgoruky, an awkward, illegitimate twenty-year-old on a desperate search for his family. This new translation of Dostoevsky's last completed novel fully captures the raciness and youthful vigor of the original text, and expresses "the innermost spiritual world of someone on the eve of manhood at that tumultuous time."


Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Author: Peter J. Leithart

Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM

Published: 2011-09-26

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1595554092

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In his twenties, Fydor Dostoevsky, son of a Moscow doctor, graduate of a military academy, and rising star of Russian literature, found himself standing in front of a firing squad, accused of subversive activities against the Russian Tsar. Then the drums rolled, signaling that instead he was to be exiled to the living death of Siberia. Siberia was so cold the mercury froze in the thermometer. In prison, Dostoevsky was surrounded by murderers, thieves, parricides, and brigands who drank heavily, quarreled incessantly, and fought with horrible brutality. However, while "prisoners were piled on top of each other in the barracks, and the floor was matted with an inch of filth," Dostoevsky learned a great deal about the human condition that was to impact his writing as nothing had before. To absorb Dostoevsky's remarkable life in these pages is to encounter a man who not only examined the quest of God, the problem of evil, and the suffering of innocents in his writing but also drew inspiration from his own deep Christian faith in giving voice to the common people of his nation... and ultimately the world.


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.