Dostoevsky's Democracy

Dostoevsky's Democracy
Author: Nancy Ruttenburg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400828929

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
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2024-03-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0198881568

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
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1351569295

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
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810128489

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.

Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times

Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times
Author: Richard Avramenko
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2018-05-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498553273

Great statesmen and gentlemen, men of honor and rank, seem to be phenomena of a bygone Aristocratic era. Aristocracies, which emphasize rank, and value difference, quality, beauty, rootedness, continuity, stand in direct contrast to democracies, which value equality, autonomy, novelty, standardization, quantity, utility and mobility. Is there any place for aristocratic values and virtues in the modern democratic social and political order? This volume consists of essays by political theorists, historians, and literary theorists that explore this question in the works of aristocratic thinkers, both ancient and modern. The volume includes analyses of aristocratic virtues, interpretations of aristocratic assemblies and constitutions, both historic and contemporary, as well as critiques of liberal virtues and institutions. Essays on Tacitus, Hobbes, Burke, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, as well as some lesser known figures, such as Henri de Boulainvilliers, John Randolph of Roanoke, Louis de Bonald, Konstantin Leontiev, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Richard Weaver, and the Eighth Duke of Northumberland, explore ways of preserving and adapting the salutary aspects of the aristocratic ethos to the needs of modern liberal societies.

Jacques Maritain and the Moral Foundation of Democracy

Jacques Maritain and the Moral Foundation of Democracy
Author: John DiJoseph
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1996
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

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.

Politics and the Novel

Politics and the Novel
Author: Irving Howe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1970
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

A study of the impact of ideology on literature.

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky
Author: Joseph Frank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 806
Release: 2003-09-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780691115696

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.