Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky

Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky
Author: George Steiner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 355
Release: 1980
Genre: Epic literature
ISBN: 9780571116263

This critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel provides detailed plot summaries of the authors' works and draws on references to Homer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Zola and Henty in order to illustrate the themes.

The Grand Inquisitor

The Grand Inquisitor
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Publisher: Lindhardt og Ringhof
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2021-12-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8726502240

‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is a short story that appears in one of Dostoevsky’s most famous works, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, but it is often read independently due to its standalone story and literary significance. In the tale, Jesus comes to Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and performs miracles but is soon arrested and sentenced to be burned. The Grand Inquisitor informs Jesus that the church no longer needs him as they are stronger under the direction of Satan. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is incredibly interesting and compelling for its philosophical discussion about religion and the human condition. The main debate put forth in the poem is whether freedom or security is more important to mankind, as an all-powerful church can provide safety but requires its followers to abandon their free will. This tale remains remarkably influential among philosophers, political thinkers, and novelists from Friedrich Nietzsche and Noam Chomsky to David Foster Wallace and beyond. Dostoevsky’s writing is both inventive and provocative in this timeless story as the reader is free to come to their own conclusions. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ should be read by anyone interested in philosophy or politics. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a famous Russian writer of novels, short stories, and essays. A connoisseur of the troubled human psyche and the relationships between the individuals, Dostoevsky’s oeuvre covers a large area of subjects: politics, religion, social issues, philosophy, and the uncharted realms of the psychological. He is most famous for the novels ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Idiot’, and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. James Joyce described Dostoevsky as the creator of ‘modern prose’ and his literary legacy is influential to this day as Dostoevsky’s work has been adapted for many movies including ‘The Double’ starring Jesse Eisenberg.

The Cossacks

The Cossacks
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2006-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1602060150

This 1862 novel, in a vibrant new translation by Peter Constantine, is Tolstoy' s semiautobiographical story of young Olenin, a wealthy, disaffected Muscovite who joins the Russian army and travels to the untamed frontier of the Caucasus in search of a more authentic life. While striving to adopt the rough and ready lifestyle of the local Cossacks, Olenin falls in love with a free-spirited girl whose fiancé turns out to be a formidable opponent. Showcasing the philosophical insight that would characterize Tolstoy' s later masterpieces, this long overdue translation is a revelation.

Mimetic Lives

Mimetic Lives
Author: Chloë Kitzinger
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2021-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810143984

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.

Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Author: Walter Moss
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1898855595

'Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky' is both history and story, incorporating in its analysis of Alexander II's turbulent reign the lives and ideas of the period's great writers, thinkers and revolutionaries who made this the Golden Age of Russian literature and thought. In his combination of considerable biographical material with the presentation of the main ideas of the era's chief writers and thinkers, Walter G. Moss has written a history that is of interest not only to scholars and students of the period, but also to more general readers.

Russia's Capitalist Realism

Russia's Capitalist Realism
Author: Vadim Shneyder
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810142481

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

Dostoevsky
Author: Joseph Frank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 984
Release: 2009-10-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1400833418

A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works—from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Before They Were Titans

Before They Were Titans
Author: Elizabeth Cheresh Allen
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1618119230

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century, Russian literature, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author—for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
Author: Harlan Ellison
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2014-04-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1497609615

Seven stunning stories of speculative fiction by the author of A Boy and His Dog. In a post-apocalyptic world, four men and one woman are all that remain of the human race, brought to near extinction by an artificial intelligence. Programmed to wage war on behalf of its creators, the AI became self-aware and turned against humanity. The five survivors are prisoners, kept alive and subjected to brutal torture by the hateful and sadistic machine in an endless cycle of violence. This story and six more groundbreaking and inventive tales that probe the depths of mortal experience prove why Grand Master of Science Fiction Harlan Ellison has earned the many accolades to his credit and remains one of the most original voices in American literature. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream also includes “Big Sam Was My Friend,” “Eyes of Dust,” “World of the Myth,” “Lonelyache,” Hugo Award finalist “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer,” and Hugo and Nebula Award finalist “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.”