Although criticized at one time for its highly tendentious spirit, Dostoevsky's Demons (1871-1872) has proven to be a novel of great polemical vitality. Originally inspired by a minor conspiratorial episode of the late 1860s, well after Dostoevsky's death (1881) the work continued to earn both acclaim and contempt for its scathing caricature of revolutionists driven by destructive, anarchic aims. The text of Demons assumed new meaning in Russian literary culture following the Bolshevik triumph of 1917, when the reestablishment and expansion of centralized state power inevitably revived interest in the radical populist tendencies of Russia's past, in particular the anarchist thought of Dostoevsky's legendary contemporary, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). Confronting Dostoevsky's 'Demons' is the first book to explore the life of Dostoevsky's novel in light of disputes and controversies over Bakunin's troubling legacy in Russia. Contrary to the traditional view, which assumes the obsolescence of Demons throughout much of the Communist period (1917-1991), this book demonstrates that the potential resurgence of Bakuninist thought actually encouraged reassessments of Dostoevsky's novel. By exploring the different ideas and critical strategies that motivated opposing interpretations of the novel in post-revolutionary Russia, Confronting Dostoevsky's 'Demons' reveals how the potential resurrection of Bakunin's anti-authoritarian ethos fostered the return of a politically reactionary novel to the canon of Russian classics.

Demons is an anti-nihilistic novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is the third of the four great novels written by Dostoyevsky after his return from Siberian exile, the others being Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Demons is a social and political satire, a psychological drama, and large scale tragedy.

This carefully crafted ebook: "Demons (The Possessed / The Devils) - The Unabridged Garnett Translation" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Demons is an 1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Though titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoyevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils or Demons. An extremely political book, Demons is a testimonial of life in Imperial Russia in the late 19th century. As the revolutionary democrats begin to rise in Russia, different ideologies begin to collide. Dostoyevsky casts a critical eye on both the liberal idealists, portraying their ideas and ideological foundation as demonic, and the conservative establishment's ineptitude in dealing with those ideas and their social consequences. The entire novel takes place in a small town outside of Petersberg and is narrated by a man named Mr. Govorov. Mr. Govorov does not witness every conversation first hand, but nonetheless the narrator describes the story as if he partook in every situation or as a chronicler, who had the events described to him. We know very little of Mr. Govorov, except that he is a close friend of Stephan Trofimovich. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky ( 1821 – 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche. Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

In the first ever book-length manifesto of Peak Oil Philosophy, Chad Haag argues that the transition to Fossil Fuel Modernity replaced the herds of megafauna of the Hunter Gatherer Worldview and the cyclically-harvested grain of the Agrarian Worldview with a single immensely powerful but quickly vanishing substance: oil. Everything we do is a euphemism for burning vast amounts of fossil fuels. Haag provides an original hierarchy of transcendental standards of meaning to reveal the extent to which our mythologies, systems, counter sense objects, and deep memes are just so many incomplete revelations of our Phenomenological awareness of petroleum. But as the globe already hit Peak Oil in 2005 and has been on the downward slope of depletion ever since, these higher order meanings have begun to collapse into falsity. Oil's peculiar role in sustaining systems of meaning precisely through imposing a hard physical limit to existence therefore requires a novel Ontology of Limitation. Haag reawakens the Heideggerian quest for Being by suggesting that even the subject itself must be understood as a limitation sustained through the limitation of, in our era, fossil fuels. Haag introduces a new table of 15 modes of truth to explicate how Peak Oil defies a simple binary of truth and falsity, given that even truth under Fossil Fuels is just a euphemism for oil's presence. Combining the Peak Oil insights of John Michael Greer and the anti-technological theories of Ted Kaczynski with the philosophical rigor of Heidegger, Aristotle, Zizek, Plato, Husserl, Descartes, and Jordan Peterson, Haag crafts a truly unique response to the challenge of joining Peak Oil and Philosophy.

"More often than not, monographs on the reception of an author are either detailed, chronologically organised accounts of the reputation of that author, or studies in literary influence. This study adopts neither of those approaches and deals with the reception of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain from a double perspective. The detailed analysis of primary sources such as reviews, essays and monographs on Dostoevskii is associated here with a critical investigation of the dynamics of the reception process. On the one hand, the available sources are examined with the intention of exposing their underlying ideological tensions and impact on British literary circles. On the other hand, Fedor Dostoevskii's novels are shown to function as a prism, through which significant aspects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British intellectual life are refracted. In the final analysis, by using Dostoevskii as an exemplary case study, this book develops both a methodology that aims at clarifying what we mean when we refer to 'reception' and a theoretical alternative to prevalent notions of reception."

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

"A mesmerizing study of books by despots great and small, from the familiar to the largely unknown." —The Washington Post A darkly humorous tour of "dictator literature" in the twentieth century, featuring the soul-killing prose and poetry of Hitler, Mao, and many more, which shows how books have sometimes shaped the world for the worse Since the days of the Roman Empire dictators have written books. But in the twentieth-century despots enjoyed unprecedented print runs to (literally) captive audiences. The titans of the genre—Stalin, Mussolini, and Khomeini among them—produced theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry, memoirs, and even the occasional romance novel and established a literary tradition of boundless tedium that continues to this day. How did the production of literature become central to the running of regimes? What do these books reveal about the dictatorial soul? And how can books and literacy, most often viewed as inherently positive, cause immense and lasting harm? Putting daunting research to revelatory use, Daniel Kalder asks and brilliantly answers these questions. Marshalled upon the beleaguered shelves of The Infernal Library are the books and commissioned works of the century’s most notorious figures. Their words led to the deaths of millions. Their conviction in the significance of their own thoughts brooked no argument. It is perhaps no wonder then, as Kalder argues, that many dictators began their careers as writers.

A fundamentally new interpretation of the emergence of modern terrorism, arguing that it formed in the Russian literary imagination well before any shot was fired or bomb exploded.