The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory

The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory
Author: Diane Oenning Thompson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1991-06-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521345723

Diane Thompson's study focuses on the meaning and poetic function of memory in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and seeks to show how Dostoevsky used cultural memory to create a synthesis between his Christian ideal and art. Memory is considered not only as a theme or subject, but also as a principle of artistic composition.

The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Robin Feuer Miller
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300151721

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel— The Brothers Karamazov—in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today “remains harrowingly alive in the face of our present day worries, paradoxes, and joys,” observes Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller. In this engaging and original book, she guides us through the complexities of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, offering keen insights and a celebration of the author’s unparalleled powers of imagination. Miller’s critical companion to The Brothers Karamazov explores the novel’s structure, themes, characters, and artistic strategies while illuminating its myriad philosophical and narrative riddles. She discusses the historical significance of the book and its initial reception, and in a new preface discusses the latest scholarship on Dostoevsky and the novel that crowned his career.

Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Author: William J. Leatherbarrow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1992-11-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521386012

This textbook series is ambitious in scope. It provides concise and lucid introductions to major works of world literature from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. It is not confined to any single literary tradition or genre, and will cumulatively form a substantial library of textbooks on some of the most important and widely read literary masterpieces. Each book is devoted to a full acount of its historical, cultural, and intellectual background, a discussion of its influence, and a guide to further reading.

Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Julian W Connolly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623560500

Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is unquestionably one of the greatest works of world literature. With its dramatic portrayal of a Russian family in crisis and its intense investigation into the essential questions of human existence, the novel has had a major impact on writers and thinkers across a broad range of disciplines, from psychology to religious and political philosophy. This proposed reader's guide has two major goals: to help the reader understand the place of Dostoevsky's novel in Russian and world literature, and to illuminate the writer's compelling and complex artistic vision. The plot of the novel centers on the murder of the patriarch of the Karamazov family and the subsequent attempt to discover which of the brothers bears responsibility for the murder, but Dostoevsky's ultimate interests are far more thought-provoking. Haunted by the question of God's existence, Dostoevsky uses the character of Ivan Karamazov to ask what kind of God would create a world in which innocent children have to suffer, and he hoped that his entire novel would provide the answer. The design of Dostoevsky's work, in which one character poses questions that other characters must try to answer, provides a stimulating basis for reader engagement. Having taught university courses on Dostoevsky's work for over twenty years, Julian W. Connolly draws upon modern and traditional approaches to the novel to produce a reader's guide that stimulate the reader's interest and provides a springboard for further reflection and study.

A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Robert Louis Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810119498

Clear and compelling new readings of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel.

The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Total Pages: 850
Release: 1992-04-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679410031

Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel is, above all, the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. It is a masterpiece that chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between an outsized father and his three very different sons. The author's towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues – brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality – that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky – the definitive version in English – magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

The Novel in the Age of Disintegration

The Novel in the Age of Disintegration
Author: Kate Holland
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810167239

Scholars have long been fascinated by the creative struggles with genre manifested throughout Dostoevsky’s career. In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland brings historical context to bear, showing that Dostoevsky wanted to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting disintegration brought on by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s. This required him to reinvent the genre. At the same time he sought to infuse his novels with the capacity to inspire belief in social and spiritual reintegration, so he returned to some older conventions of a society that was already becoming outmoded. In thoughtful readings of Demons, The Adolescent, A Writer’s Diary, and The Brothers Karamazov, Holland delineates Dostoevsky’s struggle to adapt a genre to the reality of the present, with all its upheavals, while maintaining a utopian vision of Russia’s future mission.

A Plot of Her Own

A Plot of Her Own
Author: Sona Stephan Hoisington
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780810112247

A Plot of Her Own presents compelling new readings of major texts in the Russian literary canon, all of which are readily available in translation. The female protagonists in the works examined are inextricably linked with the fundamental issues raised by the novels they inform; the interpretations offered strive not to be reductive or doctrinaire, not to be imposed from the outside but to arise from the texts themselves and the historical circumstances in which they were written. Authors discussed include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov, and the novels considered range from Fathers and Children to Zamyatin's anti-Utopian We. Throughout, the contributors new visions expand our understanding of the words and reveal new significance in them.

Aspects of Dostoevskii

Aspects of Dostoevskii
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401207895

Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century Russian writer, Dostoevskii’s continuing popularity rests on his contemporary relevance. The prophetic streak in his creativity gives him the same lasting appeal as dystopian novelists such as Zamiatin and Orwell whom he influenced and whose ethical concerns he anticipated. Religious themes are prominent in his work, too, and, though he was a believer, his interest seems to lie in the tension between faith and unbelief, which was felt as keenly in the Russia of his time as in our own. The nature of Dostoevskii’s art also continues to be debated. The older tendency to disparage his literary method has given way to a recognition of the originality of his techniques, without which his ideological concerns would not have emerged with such thought-provoking clarity. The chapters which comprise this volume address these issues in a range of Dostoevskii’s works, from shorter classics, such as House of the Dead and Notes from Underground to great novels such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. This work will be of use to scholars and students of Dostoevskii at all levels as well as to those with an interest in nineteenth-century literature more generally.

The Gift of Active Empathy

The Gift of Active Empathy
Author: Alina Wyman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810133385

This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.