The Idiot is perhaps the most difficult and surely most enigmatic of Dostoevsky’s novels. In it the novelist developed a narrator-chronicler who uses an intricate web of alternately truthful and deceptive words to create a narrative of baffling intricacy. The reader is confronted with moral and ethical problems and is forced to make his or her own decisions about the import of what has occurred.
Robin Miller analyzes the varied narrative modes and voices, as well as the inserted narratives, and examines the effects of all these on the reader. She has derived helpful insights from current writing about the phenomenology of reading by such critics as Wayne Booth, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish. She draws extensively on Dostoevsky’s letters, notebooks, and journalistic writings in describing his ideas about his readers and about the craft of fiction. These writings also provide clues to the importance of Rousseau’s Confessions and the Gothic novels for the development of Dostoevsky’s narrative techniques. The notebooks, moreover, are an indispensable source of information concerning the genesis of The Idiot and the radical changes it underwent in the course of its composition.
Although the book is primarily a close reading of The Idiot, it throws light on the later novels, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, in which Dostoevsky again makes use of a fictional narrator.
While Dostoevsky’s relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake’s ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship. Previous commentators have traced a wide-ranging hostility in Dostoevsky’s understanding of Catholicism to his Slavophilism. Blake depicts a far more nuanced picture. Her close reading demonstrates that he is repelled and fascinated by Catholicism in all its medieval, Reformation, and modern manifestations. Dostoevsky saw in Catholicism not just an inspirational source for the Grand Inquisitor but a political force, an ideological wellspring, a unique mode of intellectual inquiry, and a source of cultural production. Blake’s insightful textual analysis is accompanied by an equally penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century European revolutionary history, from Paris to Siberia, that undoubtedly influenced the evolution of Dostoevsky’s thought.
In Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, Ksana Blank borrows from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Christian dialectical traditions to formulate a dynamic image of Dostoevsky’s dialectics—distinct from Hegelian dialectics—as a philosophy of “compatible contradictions.” Expanding on the classical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, Blank guides us through Dostoevsky’s most difficult paradoxes: goodness that begets evil, beautiful personalities that bring about grief, and criminality that brings about salvation.
Dostoevsky’s philosophy of contradictions, this book demonstrates, contributes to the development of antinomian thought in the writings of early twentieth-century Russian religious thinkers and to the development of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin marks an important and original intervention into the enduring debate over Dostoevsky’s spiritual philosophy.
Confronting Bakhtin’s formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers—and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach
Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevsky’s poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevsky’s provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity.
Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource.
Italian doctor Leonardo Pazzi and Alcesta, his “future lover,” travel through the picturesque, hilly region of Sloboda, near Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine. They experience a series of encounters with local Ukrainians and nature, disappearances, and transformations filled with paradoxes. The characters are bright, marionette-like caricatures whom the author constructs and moves ostentatiously in full view of the reader, revealing his artistic devices with a sense of absurd, mischievous humor.
A novel of exuberance and whim that deconstructs the very principles of writing and estranges everyday phenomena, Dr. Leonardo’s Journey marks the highpoint of Ukrainian modernism right before it was violently cut down by Stalin’s repressions. The novel shifts away from character or plot as such and instead celebrates the places and spaces in which these things come into being, and the sheer joy of movement and experience. In this sense, Maik Yohansen’s heroes echo Mykola Hohol, whose tour through Russia’s vast spaces in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is an obvious reference point, and Laurence Sterne, whose irreverent narrative style and textual games Yohansen emulates. Presented here in a contemporary, deft English translation, the novel is a must read for everyone interested in discovering the rich heritage of Ukrainian modernism.
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