In this book Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel, and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha’s mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility “to all, for all” develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader’s guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a “monk in the world,” and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha’s brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya’s struggle to become a “new man” and Ivan’s anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha’s generative role with the young people he encounters, and his final message of hope.

This volume explores the Russia where the great writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), was born and lived. It focuses not only on the Russia depicted in Dostoevsky's works, but also on the Russian life that he and his contemporaries experienced: on social practices and historical developments, political and cultural institutions, religious beliefs, ideological trends, artistic conventions and literary genres. Chapters by leading scholars illuminate this broad context, offer insights into Dostoevsky's reflections on his age, and examine the expression of those reflections in his writing. Each chapter investigates a specific context and suggests how we might understand Dostoevsky in relation to it. Since Russia took so much from Western Europe throughout the imperial period, the volume also locates the Russian experience within the context of Western thought and practices, thereby offering a multidimensional view of the unfolding drama of Russia versus the West in the nineteenth century.

Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‐century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.

Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy​ offers a radical redefinition of Realism as a historical phenomenon, grounded in the literary manifestoes of the 1840s in three national literary canons (English, French and Russian) which issue a call to writers to record the manners and mores of their societies for posterity and thus to become "local historians." The sketch of manners becomes the instituting genre of Realism but is transformed in the major novels of the Realists into history as genealogy and into a phenomenology of modern subjectivity. Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy are brought into relation with Dostoevsky via a shared poetics as well as through a deconstructive and/or psychoanalytic analysis of their respective novels, which are interpreted in the context of various doctrines of Beauty, including Dostoevsky's own artistic credo of 1860. In this broad context of European aesthetics and the European literary canon, Dostoevsky's own view of history is illuminated in a new perspective, in which his concept of the "soil" is stripped of its conservative mask behind which emerges a (post-exile) Dostoevsky with socialist, pan-European views. The portrait of Dostoevsky which thus emerges from the present study is that of a European writer with a radically modern aesthetics and with a progressivist political orientation which is in consonance with his pre-exile affiliation with utopian socialism.

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.

The Soviets have long struggled with the knotty problem of assimilating Dostoevsky into a revolutionary culture. Yet to filmmakers, he has been a continuing inspiration, a novelist of ideas with an unparalleled gift for visualization. The sensitive medium of film, with its popularity and high official status in the Soviet Union, provides a unique opportunity to study the interplay between art and ideology. Offering a vivid picture of Soviet culture, and comparing and contrasting the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and modernism, this book shrewdly demonstrates that film and Dostoevsky have served each other well. Dostoevsky and Soviet Film blends three major motifs with ease and elegance: an analysis of all films produced in the Soviet Union which used Dostoevsky's fiction, as well as those planned but never realized; a history of the Soviet film industry spanning prerevolutionary days to the present; and an exploration of the dual challenge of art and politics which Soviet film has consistently had to face. N. M. Lary demonstrates the ways in which a number of film artists—Eisenstein, Grigori Kozintsev, Viktor Shklovsky, and Fridrikh Ermler among them—altered and extended the language of film under Dostoevsky's influence. He has included substantial excerpts from Eisenstein's notes from his "Chapter on Dostoevsky," which appear here for the first time in any language, and he also draws upon other theoretical and critical writings, film scripts, project notes, interviews, contemporary reviews, and many autobiographical reminiscences. Besides discussing such Dostoevsky adaptations as Ivan Pyriev's The Brothers Karamazav, Alov and Naumov's suppressed Nasty Story, Kulidzhanov's Crime and Punishment, and Ermler's Great Citizen, Lary offers suggestive critical analyses of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Kozintsev's King Lear. He provides as well his own provocative readings of Dostoevsky, uncovering new layers of meaning in the texts through his close study of their filmic treatment. Lary's book tells the fascinating story of Dostoevsky and Soviet film as it unfolds both onscreen and off. It not only reveals some hidden sides of Soviet resistance to Dostoevsky's work, but through its insights contributes toward a new understanding of the uses of literature in film.

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.

What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth. Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces a productive tension between mimetic characterization and the author’s ambition to transform the reader. She shows how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky create lifelike characters and why the dream of carrying the illusion of “life” beyond the novel consistently fails. Mimetic Lives challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate us by providing enduring models for the perspectives of others, with whom we can then better empathize. Seen close, the realist novel’s power to create a world of compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought and its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social, or political change. Drawing on scholarship in Russian literary studies as well as the theory of the novel, Kitzinger’s lucid work of criticism will intrigue and challenge scholars working in both fields.

A survey of 25 major European novelists from Cervantes to Kundera, highlighting their contributions to the genre.

Reconsidering Dostoevsky's legacy 200 years after his birth, this collection addresses how and why his novels contribute so much to what we think of as the modern condition.