Approaches to Teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment


Book Description

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.




Approaches to Teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment


Book Description

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.




Crime and Punishment


Book Description

Dive into the psychological depths of "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This groundbreaking novel explores the moral dilemmas faced by Raskolnikov, a troubled student who commits a heinous act, sparking a profound journey of guilt, redemption, and the search for meaning. As Dostoevsky unravels Raskolnikov's inner turmoil, you'll confront a haunting question: What does it truly mean to suffer, and can redemption be found in the darkest corners of the human soul? But here’s the unsettling truth: How far can one go in justifying their actions before the weight of conscience becomes unbearable? Engage with Dostoevsky's masterful narrative that intricately weaves philosophical questions into a gripping plot. Each character serves as a mirror reflecting society’s complexities and the shadows lurking within us all. Are you ready to embark on a journey through the intricacies of crime, punishment, and the quest for moral clarity? Experience the depth of Dostoevsky's writing through short, impactful paragraphs that challenge your perceptions and provoke deep reflection. This book is not just a story; it’s a profound exploration of the human condition. This is your chance to confront the ethical dilemmas that resonate through time. Will you let "Crime and Punishment" guide you through the labyrinth of morality and existence? Don’t miss the opportunity to own this literary masterpiece. Purchase "Crime and Punishment" now and delve into the depths of human experience!




Dostoevsky's Greatest Characters


Book Description

Addressed to all readers of Dostoevsky, as well as to teachers, students, and specialists, this lucidly-written study approaches the underground manm Raskolnikov, and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov as lucidly imagined beings whose feelings, behaviours, and ideas are expressions of their personalities and experience.




Crime and Punishment (Premium Edition)


Book Description

"Crime and Punishment," written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is a psychological novel published in 1866. It follows the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute ex-student in St. Petersburg, who plans and executes a brutal murder




Mimetic Lives


Book Description

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 and the Novel


Book Description

What place do Dostoevsky's works occupy in the history of the novel? To answer this question, Michael Holquist focuses on the formal aspects of Dostoevskian narrative. The author argues that the novel is a genre that constantly seeks its own identity: we still do not know what it is, since the uniqueness of its members defines the class to which it belongs. This anomaly explains the central role of the novel for Russians, perplexed as they were in the nineteenth century by idiosyncrasies that hindered development of a coherent national identity. Michael Holquist shows that the generic impulse of the novel to explore the mysteries of individual biography met and fused in Dostoevsky's works with the national quest of the Russians for an identity of their own. The paradox of the writer's achievement consists in the degree to which his meditations on the significance of being without a past are grounded in history. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment


Book Description

The gruesome double-murder upon which the novel Crime and Punishment hinges leads its culprit, Raskolnikov, into emotional trauma and obsessive, destructive self-reflection. But Raskolnikov's famous philosophical musings are just part of the full philosophical thought manifest in one of Dostoevsky's most famous novels. This volume, uniquely, brings together prominent philosophers and literary scholars to deepen our understanding of the novel's full range of philosophical thought. The seven essays treat a diversity of topics, including: language and the representation of the human mind, emotions and the susceptibility to loss, the nature of agency, freedom and the possibility of evil, the family and the failure of utopian critique, the authority of law and morality, and the dialogical self. Further, authors provide new approaches for thinking about the relationship between literary representation and philosophy, and the way that Dostoevsky labored over intricate problems of narrative form in Crime and Punishment. Together, these essays demonstrate a seminal work's full philosophical worth--a novel rich with complex themes whose questions reverberate powerfully into the 21st century.




Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self


Book Description

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 and The Idea of Russianness


Book Description

This book examines Dostoevsky's interest in, and engagement with, "Slavophilism", and his views on the religious, spiritual and moral ideas which he considered to be innately Russian.