
By Joseph Frank
In this e-book, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank explores one of the most vital points of 19th and 20th century Russian tradition, literature, and historical past. Delving into the differences of the Russian novel in addition to the conflicts among the non secular peasant international and the trained Russian elite, Between faith and Rationality monitors the cogent reflections of 1 of the main wonderful and flexible critics within the field.
Frank's essays offer a discriminating examine 4 of Dostoevsky's most renowned novels, speak about the talk among J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa at the factor of Dostoevsky and evil, and confront Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism. the gathering additionally examines such subject matters as Orlando Figes's sweeping survey of the background of Russian tradition, the lifetime of Pushkin, and Oblomov's effect on Samuel Beckett. Investigating the omnipresent spiritual subject matter that runs all through Russian tradition, even within the antireligious Chekhov, Frank argues that no different significant ecu literature used to be as a lot preoccupied because the Russian with the tensions among faith and rationality. Between faith and Rationality highlights this certain caliber of Russian literature and tradition, providing insights for basic readers and specialists alike.
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Example text
She was screaming. ”25 No final choice was made until later, when Dostoevsky was writing part 4 of the novel; and he thought that readers would be surprised by such a conclusion. ”26 No doubt he imagined that, given the Christian aura surrounding the prince, a more positive or “uplifting” termination might have been expected; but he found it impossible to satisfy such a presumed anticipation. The second plot-line centers on the prince’s involvement with Aglaia, who is also being courted by the polished and sophisticated nobleman Radomsky.
No attempt was made to lessen their misdeeds or to sentimentalize over their fate. But instead of being seen as aberrant monsters, they were shown rather as human beings whose often desperate crimes could be understood as responses to understandably tormenting situations. For present-day readers, the impact of Dostoevsky’s book in its own time is of less interest than what it reveals about the author himself. As I have said, he made superficial efforts to conceal his own presence by inventing a fictitious narrator, and his focus is on the world he is portraying rather than directly on himself.
Aglaia thus characterizes Myshkin, in a famous scene, as “The Poor Knight” of Pushkin’s well-known poem, a work that she recites in his presence after having spoken of the “poor knight” as “Don Quixote, only serious and not comic” (229). The third narrative strand consists of all the ancillary episodes that Dostoevsky introduces in such profusion, and which, allowing him to roam far and wide, add so much vivacity and even grotesquerie to what is otherwise a hauntingly tragic story. The first of these plot-lines centers on the Nastasya–Myshkin–Rogozhin triangle, and on the prince’s efforts to rescue the once-violated but now regal and commanding Nastasya from the self-destructive consequences of her own resentment and rage.