To the 200th Anniversary of Fyodor Dostoevsky

To the 200th Anniversary of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Alexander Ostrovsky vis-a-vis Fyodor Dostoevsky: the omedy “Rich Brides” and the novel “The Idiot”

The comedy “Rich Brides” by Alexander Ostrovsky and the novel “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky are close in staging the main plot move – the fate of a woman who sinned due to life circumstances. The main characters of both works fell victims to wealthy patrons who were going to marry them off. They have different personalities, and the heroine of “Rich Brides” Valentina Belyosova, unlike Fyodor Dostoevsky's heroine Nastasya Barashkova, at first glance seems frivolous, but the women, being accused of immorality, transformed, as female pride and a desire to defend themselves awakened in them. Impressed by Yuriy Tsyplunov's bitter emotional accusations, Valentina Belyosova is imbued with respect for him and even confesses her love. The characters in “Rich Brides” are melodramatic and comic with unexpected turns of events. Alexander Ostrovsky does not parody or imitate the author of the novel “The Idiot”, but the metamorphosis that occurred in the feelings and behaviour of Valentina Belyosova (partly in Yuriy Tsyplunov) testifies to the playwright's ability to portray complex characters, which brings his talent closer to Fyodor Dostoevsky's ability to artistically represent the dialectic of personality.

Motifs of the crisis of the Russian family and national statehood in the epic trilogy of Boleslav Markevich (“A Quarter of a Century Ago”, “The Turning Point” and “The Void”)

In Soviet times, Boleslav Markevich's novel trilogy was unconditionally considered to be among the most orthodox anti-nihilistic works. However, already contemporary to the author, conservative criticism considered the nihilists to be the artistically weakest heroes of this trilogy. What is in the centre of Boleslav Markevich's narrative, is the historical fate of the Russian nobility, which suffered a crushing defeat during the “great reforms” of the 1860s, rather than nihilists. Boleslav Markevich shows that that defeat was associated with a deep spiritual crisis of the enlightened part of the nobility, which supported the national statehood, with the latter preserving the moral foundations which strengthened the Russian family. In his trilogy, Boleslav Markevich depicts the rapidly growing crisis of those spiritual foundations, which was a fertile ground for flourishing of Russian nihilism. In this case, Boleslav Markevich is close to Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in the novel “Demons” for the first time had showed the continuity between cultural nobles and nihilists who are their heirs, the spiritual children of the latter. The lack of faith in fathers gave rise to nihilism in sons. That is why Boleslav Markevich’s focus is on the nobility rather than on Russian nihilists as, due to which that writer turned out to be a thoughtful art historian.

Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” View and Christianity: An Encounter and Departure

Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” view which was raised by Zhou before and after “May 4th” Movement, was influenced by Christianity and therefore had a scent of “humanitarian love”. Zhou Zuoren was then dazzled by humanitarian love, but there was still a distance between his thought and Christian thought. This article aims at a discussion about the distance in the spirit of Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” view and Christian humanitarianism which is represented by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and about the reasons for Zhou’s departure from the education of the masses.

Dostoevsky - Strakhov - Tolstoy: Toward to the Story of One Conflict

The well-known epistolary conflict between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Strakhov over the latter's slander of the great Russian writer's terrible sins is considered in the article from the point of view a philosophical anthropology and relations not two but between three participants of this story: Dostoyevsky, Strakhov and Tolstoy. This conflict is presented through anthropological, existential, and class prisms of description, based on a reconstruction of Strakhov's concept of man as a controversial, dual, and undefined being reflected in Dostoevsky's work. A direct relation between the definition of the dual nature of man in the works of Strakhov and Dostoevsky and interpersonal conflicts within "boundary forms of literature" is substantiated. Special attention is paid to the class of seminarians, the object of Dostoevsky's targeted criticism. He saw their worst characteristics in Strakhov personality. Tolstoy plays the role of an arbiter in this controversy, assessing the situation both in terms of literary, existential and religious thought. In the course of his examination of this conflict, his unexpected closeness to Dostoevsky was discovered in regard to assessment of Strakhov. The point of their coincidence was the "pink Christianity" of the writers, who justify man in a quite similar manner, in terms of their religious consciousness.

A.N. Ostrovsky and F.M. Dostoevsky: to the History of the Relationship

The article reconstructs the relations between two contemporaries, two classics of Russian culture – Alexander Ostrovsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The relations are considered in the dynamics of their development. Despite the fact that contemporaries of Ostrovsky and Dostoevsky noted the playwright’s critical perception of Dostoevsky’s work, the emphasis is placed on the friendly nature of their relationship, the proximity of their aesthetic views, and the commonality of their creative framework. The article stresses that the proximity of their aesthetic views on artistic creativity will become the basis for Ostrovsky’s cooperation with the Dostoevsky brothers’ journal “Vremya” (Time). The research undertaken here analyzes the reasons for the termination of this cooperation and the nature of further relations between Ostrovsky and Dostoevsky, their mutual assessment of each other’s creativity. As a result, it is noted that although Dostoevsky did not enter Ostrovsky’s inner circle, in his plays the playwright addressed the issues that worried both of them.

F. M. DOSTOEVSKY AND NIHILISTIC INTERPRETATION OF HOLBEIN'S PAINTING „DEAD CHRIST IN THE TOMB”

Ever since Hans Holbein the Younger completed his painting, The Dead Christ in the Tomb, in 1522, a question has been looming over it, namely, what message does this dead body convey? Having seen the painting in 1847, the Russian classic writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was also intrigued by this question. In his novel, The Idiot, Ippolit Terentyev seeks to give a systematic and direct answer. The article presents a hermeneutic analysis of his position, and classifies it as nihilistic. Nihilism affects all three levels of Ippolit's discourse - the ontic, eschatological and ontological. Nevertheless, the question remains: can such nihilism be justified from the perspective of the painting itself? Posing this question in the context of Alois Riegl’s periodization of European culture has proven to be interesting. He is of the opinion that, following the era of Christian monotheism, the third and the last period of the development of European culture is the natural-scientific period. This particular period, Riegl believes, began in 1520. If we choose to accept this periodization model, The Dead Christ may be seen as one of the first paintings of the modern era, keeping in mind that Holbein painted it in 1521 and 1522. As regards the issue of the body of The Dead Christ being immersed in physical suffering to the extent that the possibility of resurrection is excluded - as Ippolit presumes - this article offers certain reasons of an anatomical nature which may be interpreted theologically and which deny the validity of Ippolit’s modern, nihilistic hypothesis in regard to the meaning of Holbein's Dead Christ.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WILL HAVE BEEN VIOLENCE: JUSTICE AND LAW. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The realistic novel "The Brothers Karamazov” raises critical questions about modernist poetics, which refer to questions of religion, justice, law, and order within the narrative. They are interpreted both on the universal and the individual conceptual level, making the novel a complex system of narrative sequences. In the sequence related to the character of Ivan Karamazov, questions of fiction within fiction, writing and creation, repetition of the roles of the author and spectral characters in the story and the character of Ivan Karamazov are raised. These questions are modernist-critical and it is the intensity of their appearance that is referred to here. Modernism establishes the problematic situation of art itself, placing in the form of a meta quality, not only the question of artistic quality but also the field it belongs to in the foundations of the works of art themselves. The question raised is rooted in the basic meaning of literature. Literary forms bend self-referentially towards themselves, in order to twist anew and express reality. Modernist works ask readers whether all literary themes are legitimately literary or whether literature can deal with "any" topic. These questions have arisen since art has self-referentially bent towards the entirety of culture and art, and all the various questions raised in specific scientific fields. Therefore, it is sometimes said that literary works are, for example, philosophical, psychological. However, that refers to the entire literary order, whereas in the stated narrative the questions are so complex and the question of the literary status itself is entwined with their complexity

From Hamlet to Holmes: literary detective tradition

Exposed to the mystery of his father’s suspicious death, young Hamlet followed the riddle of solving it in the longest tragedy of Shakespeare. By suspension and the lengthy nature of detective works, Shakespeare seems to have initiated a new subgenre in drama which may have later on been converted into an independent subgenre in the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie through their imaginative characters, Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and the pair of Hercules Poirot with Miss Marple respectively. Fyodor Dostoevsky may have also spread the net of Hamletian subtext in his Crime and Punishment. Plotting a perfect crime by the murderers and the public approval of the plan, on one hand, and the inconvincible mind of the hero which ultimately undo the seemingly unsolvable puzzle, on the other, construct the very core of all aforementioned works of Shakespeare, Poe, and Doyle. The unanticipated and unpredicted findings of either Holmes or Hamlet defeat the expectations of the audience and bring the runaway justice back to her groom.