The Political And Social Thought Of F M Dostoevsky

This study concentrates on The Devils, but also places this novel in the total context of Dostoevsky’s work. Also considered is the life and work of T.N. Granovsky, who is satirised along with Turgenev in the novel, and thus offers a useful basis on which to delineate the contours of Dostoevsky’s thought. First published in 1991, the book begins from the belief that his "genius embodies much of what is typical of Russian life: his boundless vitality, his extremism, his lack of empiricism and economy. To understand Dostoevsky is therefore somehow to understand Russia." The author concludes that Dostoevsky badly misunderstood Western liberalism, but grappled very well with the psychology of the radical terrorist. This is explained with reference to his intellectual revolution, which is seen as consisting of six stages from his early works of the 1840s.

Recognized as one of the greatest novelists of all-time, Fyodor Dostoevsky continues to inspire and instigate questions about religion, philosophy, and literature. However, there has been a neglect looking at his political thought: its philosophical and religious foundations, its role in nineteenth-century Europe, and its relevance for us today. Dostoevsky’s Political Thought explores Dostoevsky’s political thought in his fictional and nonfictional works with contributions from scholars of political science, philosophy, history, and Russian Studies. From a variety of perspectives, these scholars contribute to a greater understanding of Dostoevsky not only as a political thinker but also as a writer, philosopher, and religious thinker.

For all his distance from philosophy, Dostoevsky was one of the most philosophical of writers. Drawing on his novels, essays, letters and notebooks, this volume examines Dostoevsky's philosophical thought.

One of the greatest writers of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is best known for such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. His works are widely read and studied today, and he has received much biographical and critical attention. Like many other writers of enduring literature, he engages timeless moral and theological issues. His writings and ideas are complex and reflect the swirling political and intellectual controversies of his time. This encyclopedia is a convenient and comprehensive guide to his life and writings. Through more than 200 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference details his life and career. Each of his fictional works is discussed, as are his major pieces of journalism. There are also entries for his family members, close friends and associates, places where he lived, literary movements with which he is associated, and journals or newspapers in which he published. Also included are entries for major writers and thinkers who influenced his works, and for ideas and themes that figure prominently in his writings. The entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of major works.

The history of ideas has played a central role in Russia's political and social history. Understanding its intellectual tradition and the way the intelligentsia have shaped the nation is crucial to understanding the Russia of today. This history examines important intellectual and cultural currents (the Enlightenment, nationalism, nihilism, and religious revival) and key themes (conceptions of the West and East, the common people, and attitudes to capitalism and natural science) in Russian intellectual history. Concentrating on the Golden Age of Russian thought in the mid-nineteenth century, the contributors also look back to its eighteenth-century origins in the flowering of culture following the reign of Peter the Great, and forward to the continuing vitality of Russia's classical intellectual tradition in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. With brief biographical details of over fifty key thinkers and an extensive bibliography, this book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of Russian intellectual history.

Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back “target readers”, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as text received orally, forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents’ arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol’nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.

As the post-WWII liberal democratic consensus comes under increasing assault around the globe, Zachary R. Goldsmith investigates a timely topic: the reemergence of fanaticism. His book demonstrates how the concept of fanaticism, so often flippantly invoked with little forethought, actually has a long history stretching back to ancient times. Tracing this history through the Reformation and the Enlightenment to our present moment of political extremism run amok, Goldsmith offers a novel account of fanaticism, detailing its transformation from a primarily religious to a political concept around the time of the French Revolution. He draws on the work of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—all keen observers of fanaticism, and especially its political variant—in order to explore this crucial moment in the development of political fanaticism. Examining conceptualizations of fanaticism from different geographical, political, temporal, and contextual backgrounds, Goldsmith reveals how the concept has changed over time and resists easy definition. Nevertheless, his analysis of the writings of key figures from the tradition of political thought regarding fanaticism yields a complex and nuanced understanding of the concept that allows us to productively identify and observe its most salient characteristics: irrationality, messianism, the embrace of abstraction, the desire for novelty, the pursuit of perfection, a lack of limits in politics, the embrace of violence, certainty, passion, and its perennial attraction to intellectuals. Goldsmith’s political-philosophical history of fanaticism offers us an argument and warning against fanaticism itself, demonstrating that fanaticism is antidemocratic, illiberal, antipolitical, and never necessary.

Anna A. Berman’s book brings to light the significance of sibling relationships in the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Relationships in their works have typically been studied through the lens of erotic love in the former, and intergenerational conflict in the latter. In close readings of their major novels, Berman shows how both writers portray sibling relationships as a stabilizing force that counters the unpredictable, often destructive elements of romantic entanglements and the hierarchical structure of generations. Power and interconnectedness are cast in a new light. Berman persuasively argues that both authors gradually come to consider siblinghood a model of all human relations, discerning a career arc in each that moves from the dynamics within families to a much broader vision of universal brotherhood.