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The Psycho-Spiritual Turn: The Double, “Mr. Prokharchin,” “The Landlady,” and “A Novel in Nine Letters”

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

in Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Gathering Storm (1846-1847): A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism

This chapter centers on Fyodor Dostoevsky's final break with Vissarion Belinsky and his circle, as well as his increasing struggles to stay afloat, internally and externally. It provides a unifying ... More

This chapter centers on Fyodor Dostoevsky's final break with Vissarion Belinsky and his circle, as well as his increasing struggles to stay afloat, internally and externally. It provides a unifying analysis of the novels The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady, and A Novel in Nine Letters, which Dostoevsky wrote in 1847. It also explains how the lead characters in Dostoevsky's novels confused readers with timeworn portrayals of mania and madness, roguery, and romance that related little to contemporary life. The chapter explains The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady, and A Novel in Nine Letters as a significant exercise in which Dostoevsky probed minds, hearts, and souls to understand human faults and failings. It talks about Dostoevsky's assertion that his four works did not portray political, social, and economic injustices that wreaked havoc on society, but rather the psychological and spiritual traumas of individuals that eroded humankind.Less

Pride before the Fall: Belinsky and the Aftermath of Poor Folk

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

in Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Gathering Storm (1846-1847): A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism

This chapter focuses on Fyodor Dostoevsky's increasingly tense ties with Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Panaev, and other figures of the Russian literary world. It begins ... More

This chapter focuses on Fyodor Dostoevsky's increasingly tense ties with Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Panaev, and other figures of the Russian literary world. It begins with a piece about Dostoevsky's tortuous tie to Belinsky as a stance of love and hate that haunted him throughout his life. It also recounts Dostoevsky's conflicted feelings over Belinsky, particularly during the eighteen or so months of their close relationship. It then discusses how Dostoevsky saw Belinsky as a mentor and guide, even as a parental figure who extended the life lessons of father Michael and mother Maria in his childhood, adolescence, and youth. Finally, the chapter looks at Dostoevsky's disagreement on Belinsky's attempt to bend him to his aesthetic will and to make him a critic of political and social ills.Less

Havens from the Storms: The Vielgorskys, Beketovs, and Maykovs

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

in Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Gathering Storm (1846-1847): A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism

This chapter deals with the negative reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky from writers and critics in response to the success of Poor Folk and the failures that followed quickly. It discusses the ... More

This chapter deals with the negative reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky from writers and critics in response to the success of Poor Folk and the failures that followed quickly. It discusses the Vielgorskys, Maykovs, and Beketovs as the three families who proved to be Dostoevsky's salvation from personal and professional storms from 1846 to 1847. It also mentions Mikhail Vielgorsky who was a wealthy count, composer, and writer of romances that Dostoevsky visited in early 1846. The chapter recounts how the colorful Maykovs came into Dostoevsky's life in the first two years after the publication of Poor Folk in early 1846. It talks about the Beketovs, who enjoyed personal and professional success and provided solace and support for Dostoevsky.Less

The Dream of a Ridiculous Writer – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Katy Masuga

in Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

This chapter studies Fyodor Dostoevsky, another of Miller's writing influences, showing him as a way to prevent the paradox of simultaneous living and creative expression in writing. It shows how ... More

This chapter studies Fyodor Dostoevsky, another of Miller's writing influences, showing him as a way to prevent the paradox of simultaneous living and creative expression in writing. It shows how Miller's writing considers the question of how a text is read and also examines the importance of distinguishing between the writer and the persona.Less

Introduction

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

in Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Gathering Storm (1846-1847): A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism

This chapter recounts Fyodor Dostoevsky's popularity as a young Russian writer in early 1846 after his publication of Poor Folk. It elaborates how Dostoevsky was hailed as a savior, a prophet, and an ... More

This chapter recounts Fyodor Dostoevsky's popularity as a young Russian writer in early 1846 after his publication of Poor Folk. It elaborates how Dostoevsky was hailed as a savior, a prophet, and an idol whom God had chosen to lead Russian literature from alleged deserts to promised lands during his time. It also mentions Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Nekrasov, who had been educated in the school of hard knocks and were particularly taken with Dostoevsky. The chapter describes Belinsky and Nekrasov as romantics, staunch realists, and avid proponents of progressivism in Russian literature and life from 1846 to 1847. It then explains how Dostoevsky was alien or indifferent to sociopolitical discussions despite the cosmopolitan formation of his early years.Less

Notes from the borderlands: repressing the returned

in Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter

This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and ... More

This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and disparate events are all part of the circuit of culture that shapes epilepsy narratives well into the twentieth century. This chapter shows the success of Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky in negotiating from the borderlands an enunciative position that compelled medical engagement and dialogue that goes some way in addressing the unliveable oppositions confronting Myers. It also suggests the conflict faced by Myers as a physician and an epileptic at the end of the nineteenth century.Less

Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism

Val Vinokur

in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context

This chapter examines the tension between Russian existentialism and existential “Russianism” by focusing on key moments from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov and ... More

This chapter examines the tension between Russian existentialism and existential “Russianism” by focusing on key moments from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov and from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In particular, it evokes a “Russian existentialism” that avoids the tendency to dwell exclusively on Russian literary angst and instead attends to the range and complexity of the human “about which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.” It also considers “religious” Russian proto-existentialists and literary commentators such as Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov and locates Emmanuel Levinas within this broader tradition. Furthermore, it discusses the way Dostoevsky and Tolstoy portrayed the cleaving of consciousness—so important to later existentialist thinkers—and raised questions about the meaning of life by dwelling on the issue of theodicy: how to sustain belief in God given the merciless evil that one encounters in the world.Less

Berdyaev’s Insight

Arthur Versluis

in The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism

This chapter examines the thoughts of essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky and political philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev on the relation between communism and Roman Catholicism. In one of his major works, ... More

This chapter examines the thoughts of essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky and political philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev on the relation between communism and Roman Catholicism. In one of his major works, Dostoevsky have suggested that communism had its origin in some aspects of Roman Catholicism. Berdyaev acknowledged that Dostoevsky foresaw the demonic aspect of the Russian Revolution and the demonic metaphysics of revolution. However, Berdyaev believed that it is not so important whether communism has part of its origin in Catholicism and that what matters is the underlying dynamic of heretic-hunting itself. He asserted that the root of the Inquisition was fanaticism and suggested a parallelism with the emergence and growth of communism.Less

The Glory of God Hidden in Creation: Eastern Views of Nature in Fyodor Dostoevsky and St. Isaac the Syrian

Bruce V. Foltz

in The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible

The same bias that allows Lynn White Jr. to posit Western Christianity as normative for the Christian tradition as such allows Western interpreters of Dostoevsky to regard the affirmation of nature’s ... More

The same bias that allows Lynn White Jr. to posit Western Christianity as normative for the Christian tradition as such allows Western interpreters of Dostoevsky to regard the affirmation of nature’s holiness in his writings, deeply resonant of Russian Orthodoxy, as nevertheless somehow pagan and aberrant. In fact, Dostoevsky’s characterization of nature draws upon central features of Orthodox spirituality as a whole: its emphasis upon divine energies at work in the world; its teachings concerning divine logoi uniquely inherent in each thing; its belief that creation represents the first icon of God, albeit obscured through human fallenness; its view of nature as cosmic liturgy, and redemption as cosmic in scope; and its claim that these truths can be apprehended through the ascetic purification of the heart. These insights are articulated eloquently in the writings of St Isaac of Syria, who in fact exerted a strong influence on Dostoevsky’s own thinking.Less

Introduction

in The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, to explore the Jewish stereotype in the works of three prominent Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, ... More

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, to explore the Jewish stereotype in the works of three prominent Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, Ivan Turgenev's “The Jew,” and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. The focus is on the ways in which Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky exploit the stereotype of the ridiculous Jew for different literary and cultural ends. The chapter then discusses representations of the Jew as devil and homo economicus, the good Jew, the inscribable Jew, Jewish assimilation and conversion, and the Jewish body. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy

Anne Lounsbery

in Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917

This chapter begins with a brief look at Leo Tolstoy's symbolic geography. His is an imaginary landscape that is by no means structured around a provintsiia/stolitsa binary and is thus an exception ... More

This chapter begins with a brief look at Leo Tolstoy's symbolic geography. His is an imaginary landscape that is by no means structured around a provintsiia/stolitsa binary and is thus an exception to the rule that is the subject of this book. The overview of Tolstoy serves as background to a closer analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's geography, an analysis focused on Demons—a novel in which both the provintsiia/stolitsa binary and the trope of Russia's empty provinces take on great determinative power. If Dostoevsky at times recapitulates familiar images of the provinces, in Demons he also makes ideological use of them in ways that are strikingly original. He dwells on the essentialized difference between center and periphery in order to underscore how provincial isolation fosters a dangerous kind of intellectual vulnerability.Less

Conclusion

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

in Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Gathering Storm (1846-1847): A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism

This chapter recounts how Fyodor Dostoevsky was decidedly not on the straight and steady path that Pushkin and Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy appeared to travel to glory and fame in 1846 and 1847. It ... More

This chapter recounts how Fyodor Dostoevsky was decidedly not on the straight and steady path that Pushkin and Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy appeared to travel to glory and fame in 1846 and 1847. It elaborates Dostoevsky's feelings of going off the rails in literature and life when he published The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady, and A Novel in Nine Letters after he released Poor Folk. It also describes the disturbed and deranged characters, complex and convoluted plots, and winding and windy prose of Dostoevsky's four works that caused former admirers and fans to lose faith in him and look elsewhere for solutions to national problems. The chapter speculates about scenarios of what would have happened if Dostoevsky had handled the success of Poor Folk in a more humble and judicious way.Less

Fear and Trembling and the Paradox of Christian Existentialism

George Pattison

in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context

This chapter examines the paradox of Christian existentialism by tracing how a number of thinkers take on the troubling theme of “the exception,” which is entailed by Søren Kierkegaard’s argument in ... More

This chapter examines the paradox of Christian existentialism by tracing how a number of thinkers take on the troubling theme of “the exception,” which is entailed by Søren Kierkegaard’s argument in Fear and Trembling concerning the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” More specifically, it considers how Kierkegaard treated the problem of “the exception” to systems of universal ethics in his discussion of Abraham’s response to God’s call to sacrifice his son Isaac as a sign of faith. It also discusses the dilemmas raised by Kierkegaard that were later taken up by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, it explores Christian existential theology in the work of Paul Tillich and Nicholas Berdyaev to show how Christian theorists addressed the possibility of faith in a world where God is invisible or absent.Less

Making Suffering Visible

Laura Otis

in Banned Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel

Attempts to manifest one’s suffering visually can turn aggressive if the people who have supposedly caused one’s pain refuse to see the results. Metaphors that suggest how pain looks can convey the ... More

Attempts to manifest one’s suffering visually can turn aggressive if the people who have supposedly caused one’s pain refuse to see the results. Metaphors that suggest how pain looks can convey the cutting, wounding aspects of emotional anguish. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground associates spite and vengefulness with darkness and dirt and shows how painful encounters can be when a hidden creature reveals himself to others. Franz Kafka’s representation of Gregor Samsa as a monstrous vermin in The Metamorphosis forces Gregor’s family to see the emotions they have aroused by exploiting him. Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché depicts a marginalized family determined to make a privileged man see how he has benefited from their deprivation. With a violent literal and metaphoric “cut,” the poor man ensures that the rich one will never stop witnessing the pain he has caused. Manifested visually, emotional pain can show itself through violent transformations of bodies.Less

Gary Saul Morson's Narrative and Freedom

Joseph Frank

in Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture

Gary Saul Morson is best known as the co-author, with Caryl Emerson, of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, which is unquestionably the most complete, well-rounded, and judicious analysis in ... More

Gary Saul Morson is best known as the co-author, with Caryl Emerson, of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, which is unquestionably the most complete, well-rounded, and judicious analysis in English of the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. His first book, devoted to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer, treats much less the contents of that unique work than the dialectic Morson discerns in it between Utopia and irony. In Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1994), he raises the question—and answers it in strikingly innovative ways—of how a world of human beings exercising freedom and ignorant of the future can be depicted in a work of literature whose structure is necessarily limited and closed by the sovereign will of its author. Morson begins with some reflections on the nature of time, and outlines various types of predetermination: eternal recurrence; the presumed foreshadowing of the New Testament by the Old; and the assumptions of Marxists that history's laws have been writ plain for them to read in their own sacred texts.Less

Murder as One of the Middlebrow Arts

Louise McReynolds

in Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia

This chapter examines fictional portrayals of murder as a means of understanding how Russian audiences adjusted to the postreform society. A murder with no mystery, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and ... More

This chapter examines fictional portrayals of murder as a means of understanding how Russian audiences adjusted to the postreform society. A murder with no mystery, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) established what would become identifiable as the generic conventions of crime fiction in Russia. Crime fiction takes up the ideological challenge of why individuals transgress the boundaries established by the society of which they are members. The emphasis on the why rather than the who, the greater interest in the motive rather than in an identity that must be uncovered, would characterize Russia's fictional forays beyond the law. By the turn of the twentieth century, because of the effects of the reforms and the government's push toward industrialization, crime fiction began changing perceptively, moving away from moral melodramas toward shorter stories that emphasized violence.Less

Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Adirer

Joseph Frank

in Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture

Yves Bonnefoy knew the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky perfectly and called him, in a lecture of 1979, the greatest of novelists, but there are also good historical grounds for asserting that, besides ... More

Yves Bonnefoy knew the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky perfectly and called him, in a lecture of 1979, the greatest of novelists, but there are also good historical grounds for asserting that, besides Dostoevsky, other aspects of early twentieth-century Russian culture provided an essential element his formation. One was Boris de Schloezer, who played a significant role in France's cultural and particularly musical life as critic en titre for the Nouvelle revue française until his death in 1969. Among Bonnefoy's translations were several works of the émigré Russian philosopher Lev Chestov, including Le Pouvoir des clefs, which played an important role in his own literary and spiritual development. Bonnefoy's own elucidation of the essential creative intuition from which his poetry springs bears an uncanny resemblance to William Wordsworth's description of those “spots of time” that furnished him, Wordsworth, with poetic inspiration.Less

Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron

Claire Davison

in Contradictory Woolf

This chapter examines a translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Virginia Woolf and Samuel Koteliansky, with particular emphasis on Woolf's precise role in the translating process and how this translation ... More

This chapter examines a translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Virginia Woolf and Samuel Koteliansky, with particular emphasis on Woolf's precise role in the translating process and how this translation differed from other English and French versions. Woolf's 1925 essay “A Russian Point of View” seemingly flaunts contradictions or ambivalence, in terms of subject as well as authorial stance, creating an underlying tension that remains unresolved to the end. The essay's opening pages do not only draw on Woolf's own publications on Russian literature since 1917, but also interweave her own recycled ideas with an intriguing mish-mash of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian voices. The chapter then considers how translating as an activity and a concept gave rise to an essential and revealing dynamics in Woolf's creative work as much as in her critical reflections on language, translation, and the meaning of meaning.Less

Solitary Savages

Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe

in Crimes of Art + Terror

This chapter analyzes the works of Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Scorsese, and Bret Easton Ellis. It presents an account of a man's renewal, a criminal who was half ... More

This chapter analyzes the works of Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Scorsese, and Bret Easton Ellis. It presents an account of a man's renewal, a criminal who was half Irish and half Chinese, one Rufus (a.k.a. Jack) Henry Abbott, which became famous with the help of a famous writer, Norman Mailer, and an ambitious editor at Random House, Errol McDonald. It describes a young gentleman scholar who came to St. Petersburg from the provinces to study the law; the literary antecedent of the Unabomber, another man of words, with educative designs on his society, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Finally, it analyzes the Martin Scorsese, The King of Comedy.Less