The explanation for the absence of this elementary question is, of course, the literary genius of
Dostoyevsky. He made the transitions from the possible to the impossible narrations so smooth, so imperceptible, that they remain invisible to all but the most attentive reader.
'Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness', I tell him, quoting possibly the only
Dostoyevsky quote I can remember.
(36)
Dostoyevsky's response, with all the succeeding ideas of Russians as God-bearing people destined to save the world from Western ungodliness, prophetically set an example of a conservative rebellion of the sacred mind, which, instead of being "determined on laying claim to a human situation in which all the answers are human, in other words formulated in reasonable terms," (37) revolts against the very prospect of such a choice.
In the study at hand, I explore how the source of joy is demonstrated as being one of knowledge rather than one of circumstance in
Dostoyevsky and Bernanos.
Plays or prose by four writers, William Shakespeare, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse, and C.S.
SAINT PETERSBURG: Inside an old Saint Petersburg flat that was once home to Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, a new exhibition plunges visitors into the dark and complex world of "Crime and Punishment," shedding new light on one of Russia's greatest literary works 150 years after its publication.
Earlier works sourced text from Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (Absolute Event, 2013) and Sartre's No Exit (In Camera, 2012); here,
Dostoyevsky's protoexistentialist novella Notes from the Underground provided content to rub against the grain of the formulaic lecture style symptomatic of our neoliberal moment--the TED talk, in which innovations in technology, entertainment, and design are narrated as stories of personal transformation delivered in lean, highly seductive narrative arcs.
You must read all the
Dostoyevsky in the library, and forget it.
Mark Wahlberg, best remembered for being best mates with a stuffed toy in Ted, stars in a peculiar and haphazard psychodrama based on Fyodor
Dostoyevsky's minor 19th century novella.
"In Talking Band's performance lab, we were reading new translations of
Dostoyevsky," Zimet reports, "alongside critical commentary by Mikhail Bakhtin.
Returning to Stead's important point, why shouldn't contemporary readers read the actual great novelists of the 19th century--Balzac, Dickens, Melville, Eliot, James, Wharton, Twain, Stendhal--not to mention Tolstoy and greatest of all
Dostoyevsky, instead of Catton's ersatz and inferior version?