F. M. Dostoevsky and André Gide PDF Download

Author: Tatiana Vacquier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Author: Miriam T. Šajkovic
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512806188
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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"Dostoevsky is the unrivaled and perspicacious seer of the human mind and heart; he emerges as a great friend and teacher of humanity. He has dearly read the signs of our times, for he lived through the agonizing doubts and despairs of our present spiritual crisis. His sincerity, his spiritual heroism, and his moral courage have never been questioned. " With these words, the author of the present work, Miriam T. Šajković, begins her initial attempt to acquaint American readers with Dostoevsky's philosophy of education. The views of Dostoevsky on educational problems in his own time have been historically explored by Šajković in relation to nineteenth-century Russia and the events which shaped its attitudes and customs. The author has studied the central aspects of Dostoevsky's system in order to extract from them a contribution toward the formulation of a philosophy of education suitable for the present time. Šajković proposes that a new synthesis of Dostoevsky's thought and contemporary American pedagogy be effected for the purpose of reinstating serious reflection upon modern morals and religion. The book contains an annotated bibliography, conveniently divided into sections according to various high school reading levels; selections from his letters, arranged under topic headings; a chronological table of his works; and a master bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A unique and valuable contribution to both philosophy of education and Dostoevsky commentary, Dostoevsky: His Image of Man will be of lasting worth to professional educators in particular, as well as students of literature in general.

Author: Peter McGuire Wolf
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581120060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Dostoevsky's novels have contributed to a conception of man that reverberates in the conclusions of prominent twentieth-century philosophical anthropologists. Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus, among others, have admitted that the works of Dostoevsky had an influence on the manner in which they learned to conceive of human nature and the world in which humans live. Our aim in this dissertation is to ask: what is there in the novels of Dostoevsky concerning the nature of man, of which certain philosophers could claim that in their philosophical conceptions of man they were positively influenced by him? The main thesis is substantiated with a careful analysis of four novels: Notes From the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma), Notes From the Underground (Zapiski iz podpol'ia), Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), and The Brothers Karamazov (Brat'ia Karamazovy). These novels were chosen partly because I have come to the conclusion that these novels, more than others, concretely show in what sense the leading characters appear to have made themselves be what they had freely chosen to be under the circumstances in which they had to live, and that they were fully aware of the responsibility they had to bear for the implications and consequences of what they had thus decided. Based upon a close reading, four interpretive chapters employ the most significant criticism from English, Russian and French literary scholarship. Dostoevsky's philosophical conception of man is compared and contrasted with the conception that Scheler and Heidegger hold, i.e., that freedom is man's essence, Sartre's atheistic humanism and Camus' thought. The following conclusions are consonant with Dostoevsky's work: freedom is constitutive for the being (or the mode of being; essence) of man, it is an inalienable duty--one must become oneself. Man strives to overcome himself and to exceed his freedom but in so doing invariably loses it. Man exceeds himself only in the sense that he realizes an ideal human possibility. The Dostoevskian man reveals not only the absence of human nature but also the enormous power which man possesses for achieving his ideal human possibility.

Author: William Peter van den Bercken
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857289764
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Dostoevsky's ambiguous treatment of religious issues in his literary works strongly differs from the slavophile Orthodoxy of his journalistic writings. In the novels Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems. This study is based on a balanced method of literary analysis and theological evaluation of the texts, avoiding free theological association as well as hermeneutical mixing with the non-literary writings of Dostoevsky. The study starts by discussing the main recent studies of Dostoevsky's religion. It then describes Dostoevsky's original literary method in dealing with religious issues - his use of paradoxes, contradictions and irony. 'Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky' ultimately deconstructs Dostoevsky as an Orthodox writer, and reveals that the Christian themes in his novels are not ecclesiastical or confessionally theological ones, but instead are expressions of a fundamentally Christian anthropology and biblical ethics.

Author: Mischa Harry Fayer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Liberty
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Author: Steven Cassedy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804767613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Any reader of Dostoevsky is immediately struck by the importance of religion within the world of his fiction. That said, it is very difficult to locate a coherent set of religious beliefs within Dostoevsky’s works, and to argue that the writer embraced these beliefs. This book provides a trenchant reassessment of his religion by showing how Dostoevsky used his writings as the vehicle for an intense probing of the nature of Christianity, of the individual meaning of belief and doubt, and of the problems of ethical behavior that arise from these questions. The author argues that religion represented for Dostoevsky a welter of conflicting views and stances, from philosophical idealism to nationalist messianism. The strength of this study lies in its recognition of the absence of a single religious prescription in Dostoevsky's works, as well as in its success in tracing the background of the ideas animating Dostoevsky’s religious probing.

Author: André Gide
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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This was the first publication in English in its entirety of Gide's critical study of the Russian genius. Albert J. Guerard notes in his introduction, [This book] conveys . . . the excitement of intensely personal and sympathetic reading and the shock of recognition.

Author: Nancy Ruttenburg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400828929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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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.

Author: Victor Terras
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299160548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Admirers have praised Fedor Dostoevsky as the Russian Shakespeare, while his critics have slighted his novels as merely cheap amusements. In this critical introduction to Dostoevsky's fiction, the author asks readers to draw their own conclusions about the nineteenth-century Russian writer. Discussing psychological, political, mythical, and philosophical approaches, he guides readers through the range of diverse and even contradictory interpretations of Dostoevsky's rich novels.

Author: Jonathan Paine
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674243048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers. An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diary of its author’s struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. The Brothers Karamazov transforms into a story of Dostoevsky’s sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola’s Money documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola’s own big business, his factory of novels. Combining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value.