Dostoevsky And The Riddle Of The Self

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Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

Author : Yuri Corrigan
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 081013571X
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self by : Yuri Corrigan

Download or read book Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self written by Yuri Corrigan and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs

Author : Lynn Ellen Patyk
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 081014574X
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs by : Lynn Ellen Patyk

Download or read book Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs written by Lynn Ellen Patyk and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Bakhtin’s formative reading of Dostoevsky to recover the ways the novelist stokes conflict and engages readers—and to explore the reasons behind his adversarial approach Like so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art. Challenging, revising, and expanding on Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Patyk demonstrates that provocation is the moving mover of Dostoevsky’s poetics of conflict, and she identifies the literary devices he uses to propel plot conflict and capture our attention. Yet the full scope of Dostoevsky’s provocative authorial activity can only be grasped alongside an understanding of his key themes, which both probed and exploited the most divisive conflicts of his era. The ultimate stakes of such friction are, for him, nothing less than moral responsibility and the truth of identity. Sober and strikingly original, compassionate but not uncritical, Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs exposes the charged current in the wiring of our modern selves. In an economy of attention and its spoils, provocation is an inexhaustibly renewable and often toxic resource.

Mimetic Lives

Author : Chloë Kitzinger
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810143984
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Mimetic Lives by : Chloë Kitzinger

Download or read book Mimetic Lives written by Chloë Kitzinger and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment"

Author : Deborah A. Martinsen
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
ISBN 13 : 1644697866
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (446 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" by : Deborah A. Martinsen

Download or read book Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" written by Deborah A. Martinsen and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide focuses on narrative strategy, psychology, and ideology. Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder Raskolnikov gives as he confesses to Sonya, Dostoevsky debunks rationality-based theories. Finally, the question of why Raskolnikov and others, including the reader, focus on the murder of the pawnbroker and forget the unintended murder of Lizaveta reveals a narrative strategy based on shame and guilt.

Approaches to Teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Author : Michael R. Katz
Publisher : Modern Language Association
ISBN 13 : 1603295798
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Approaches to Teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment by : Michael R. Katz

Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment written by Michael R. Katz and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounting the murder of an elderly woman by a student expelled from university, Crime and Punishment is a psychological and political novel that portrays the strains on Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, moves in a world of dire poverty, disillusionment, radicalism, and nihilism interwoven with religious faith and utopianism. In Dostoevsky's innovative style, which he called fantastic realism, the narrator frequently reports from within the protagonist's mind. The depiction of the desperate lives of tradespeople, students, alcoholics, prostitutes, and criminals gives readers insight into the urban society of St. Petersburg at the time. The first part of this book offers instructors guidance on editions and translations, a map of St. Petersburg showing locations mentioned in the novel, a list of characters and an explanation of the Russian naming system, and recommendations for further reading. In the second part, essays analyze key scenes, address many of Dostoevsky's themes, and consider the roles of ethics, gender, money, Orthodox Christianity, and social justice in the narrative. The volume concludes with essays on digital media, film adaptations, and questions of translation.

Dostoevsky at 200

Author : Katherine Bowers
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487538650
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky at 200 by : Katherine Bowers

Download or read book Dostoevsky at 200 written by Katherine Bowers and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer’s art – specifically the tension between experience and formal representation – as its central theme. While many critical approaches to Dostoevsky’s works are concerned with spiritual and philosophical dilemmas, this volume focuses instead on questions of design and narrative to explore Dostoevsky and the novel from a multitude of perspectives. Contributors situate Dostoevsky’s formal choices of narrative, plot, genre, characterization, and the novel itself within modernity and consider how the experience of modernity led to Dostoevsky’s particular engagement with form. Conceived as a forum for younger scholars working in new directions in Dostoevsky scholarship, this volume asks how narrative and genre shape Dostoevsky’s works, as well as how they influence the way modernity is represented. Of interest not only to readers and scholars of Russian literature but also to those curious about the genre of the novel more broadly, Dostoevsky at 200 is pathbreaking in its approach to the question of Dostoevsky’s contribution to the novel as a form.

Dostoevsky as Suicidologist

Author : Amy D. Ronner
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793607826
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky as Suicidologist by : Amy D. Ronner

Download or read book Dostoevsky as Suicidologist written by Amy D. Ronner and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim’s etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in Dostoevsky scholarship, but provides fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s major works, including Notes from The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Ronner provides an exegesis of how Dostoevsky’s implicit awareness of fatalistic, altruistic, egoistic, and anomic modes of self-destruction helped shape not only his philosophy, but also his craft as a writer. In this study, Ronner contributes to the field of suicidology by anatomizing both self-destructive behavior and suicidal ideation while offering ways to think about prevention. But most expansively, Ronner tackles the formidable task of forging a ligature between artistic creation and the pluripresent social fact of self-annihilation.

Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism

Author : Paul J. Contino
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1725250748
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (252 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism by : Paul J. Contino

Download or read book Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism written by Paul J. Contino and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Reading Backwards

Author : Muireann Maguire
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1800641222
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Backwards by : Muireann Maguire

Download or read book Reading Backwards written by Muireann Maguire and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book outlines with theoretical and literary historical rigor a highly innovative approach to the writing of Russian literary history and to the reading of canonical Russian texts. "Anticipatory plagiarism” is a concept developed by the French Oulipo group, but it has never to my knowledge been explored with reference to Russian studies. The editors and contributors to the proposed volume – a blend of senior and beginning scholars, Russians and non-Russians – offer a set of essays on Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy which provocatively test the utility of AP as a critical tool, relating these canonical authors to more recent instances, some of them decidedly non-canonical. The senior scholars who are the editors and most of the contributors are truly distinguished. The volume is likely to receive serious attention and to be widely read. I recommend it with unqualified enthusiasm. William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Harvard University As the founder of the notion of "plagiarism by anticipation", which was stolen from me in the sixties by fellow colleagues, I am delighted to learn that my modest contribution to literary theory will be used to better understand the interplay of interferences in Russian literature. Indeed, one would have to be naive to think that the great Russian authors would have invented everything. In fact, they were able to draw their ideas from their predecessors, but also from their successors, testifying to the open-mindedness that characterizes the Slavic soul. This book restores the truth. Pierre Bayard, Professor of Literature, University of Paris 8 This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives. Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature re-assesses three major nineteenth-century authors—Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—either in terms of previous writers and artists who plagiarized them (such as Raphael, Homer, or Hall Caine), or of their own depredations against later writers (from J.M. Coetzee to Liudmila Petrushevskaia). Far from suggesting that past authors literally stole from their descendants, these engaging essays, contributed by both early-career and senior scholars of Russian and comparative literature, encourage us to identify the contingent and familiar within classic texts. By moving beyond rigid notions of cultural heritage and literary canons, they demonstrate that inspiration is cyclical, influence can flow in multiple directions, and no idea is ever truly original. This book will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Russian Studies. The introductory discussion of the origins and context of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’, alongside varied applications of the concept, will also be of interest to those working in the wider fields of comparative literature, reception studies, and translation studies.

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form

Author : Greta Matzner-Gore
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 081014199X
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form by : Greta Matzner-Gore

Download or read book Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form written by Greta Matzner-Gore and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.

Reader as Accomplice

Author : Alexander Spektor
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810142473
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Reader as Accomplice by : Alexander Spektor

Download or read book Reader as Accomplice written by Alexander Spektor and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov seek to affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction at the formal level. By doing so, these two authors ask us to consider and respond to the ethical demands that narrative acts of representation and interpretation place on authors and readers. Using the lens of narrative ethics, Alexander Spektor brings to light the important, previously unexplored correspondences between Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Ultimately, he argues for a productive comparison of how each writer investigates the ethical costs of narrating oneself and others. He also explores the power dynamics between author, character, narrator, and reader. In his readings of such texts as “The Meek One” and The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Bend Sinister and Despair by Nabokov, Spektor demonstrates that these authors incite the reader’s sense of ethics by exposing the risks but also the possibilities of narrative fiction.

Writing Fear

Author : Katherine Bowers
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487526946
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Fear by : Katherine Bowers

Download or read book Writing Fear written by Katherine Bowers and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside – a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. In fact, its legacy is much more enduring, persisting within later Russian literary movements. Writing Fear explores Russian literature’s engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. Katherine Bowers shows how these practices shaped literary realism from its romantic beginnings through the big novels of the 1860s and 1870s to its transformation during the modernist period. Bowers traces the development of gothic realism with an emphasis on the affective power of fear. She then investigates the hybrid genre’s function in a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address social and political issues such as urban life, the woman question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, Writing Fear challenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.

The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880

Author : Anna A. Berman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192866621
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880 by : Anna A. Berman

Download or read book The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880 written by Anna A. Berman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis--looking back to ancestors and head to progeny--while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis--family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.

Writing Myself to Death

Author : August Franza
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1796042757
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Myself to Death by : August Franza

Download or read book Writing Myself to Death written by August Franza and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Myself to Death is a novel about the inscrutable lives, existential uncertainties, loves, hates, idiocies, and masquerades of Max, A., and Mr. Kiss. Here’s another way of putting it: Max and Mr. Kiss are telling stories and tales about reconnaissance, mangoes, griefs, balloons, and A. Then again, they may be lying.

Dostoevsky's "Idiot"

Author : Bruce A. French
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780810117457
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (174 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky's "Idiot" by : Bruce A. French

Download or read book Dostoevsky's "Idiot" written by Bruce A. French and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prince Myshkin is one of Dostoevsky's most perplexing creations. In this study, Bruce A. French presents a provocative interpretation of the religious dimension of Myshkin's goodness from a Bakhtinian perspective. In three chapters, French takes up in turn the narrator and narrative points of view, the author's use of inserted narratives, and three modes of interaction French calls Monologue, Dialogue, and Dialogical Living.

Dostoevsky

Author : Jessie Coulson
Publisher : London, New York, Oxford
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Dostoevsky by : Jessie Coulson

Download or read book Dostoevsky written by Jessie Coulson and published by London, New York, Oxford. This book was released on 1962 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection from his letters, translated and with a running biographical commentary by the author. Includes two appendices, the first is a chronological list of the letters; the other an alphabetical arrangement of biographies of personalities mentioned in the letters.

The Possessed

Author : Elif Batuman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 142993641X
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Possessed by : Elif Batuman

Download or read book The Possessed written by Elif Batuman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics. No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.