Reading Dostoevsky

Download or read book The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature. Among Dostoevsky's prototypical characters is Yemelyan in The Honest Thief, whose tragedy turns on an inability to resist crime. Presented in chronological order, in David Magarshack's celebrated translation, this is the definitive edition of Dostoevsky's best stories.

Download or read book Reading Dostoevsky written by Victor Terras and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Admirers have praised Fedor Dostoevsky as the Russian Shakespeare, while his critics have slighted his novels as merely cheap amusements. In this critical introduction to Dostoevsky's fiction, the author asks readers to draw their own conclusions about the nineteenth-century Russian writer. Discussing psychological, political, mythical, and philosophical approaches, he guides readers through the range of diverse and even contradictory interpretations of Dostoevsky's rich novels.

Download or read book Dostoevsky written by Rowan Williams and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rowan Williams explores the intricacies of speech, fiction, metaphor, and iconography in the works of one of literature's most complex and most misunderstood, authors. Williams' investigation focuses on the four major novels of Dostoevsky's maturity (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov). He argues that understanding Dostoevsky's style and goals as a writer of fiction is inseparable from understanding his religious commitments. Any reader who enters the rich and insightful world of Williams' Dostoevsky will emerge a more thoughtful and appreciative reader for it.

Download or read book Dostoevsky's Secrets written by Carol Apollonio Flath and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand. In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

Download or read book The Crocodile written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published by Alma Classics. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The civil servant Ivan Matveich and his wife Yelena Ivanovna are spectators of an exhibition – in a shopping arcade – of a crocodile owned by a German, when Ivan is suddenly swallowed alive by the animal. Unsuccessful in his attempts to be freed from his prison, due to the German's concern for his crocodile and excessive desire for compensation, the civil servant gradually comes to appreciate his new environment, while his wife begins to enjoy her new-found freedom. Inspired by Gogol's surreal tales, Dostoevsky's hilarious story has been interpreted by some as a vitriolic piece of social criticism and a veiled attack on the revolutionary philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

Download or read book Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Masterpieces written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821 - 188) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. In this book: The Brothers Karamazov Crime and Punishment Translator: Constance Garnett

Download or read book The Dream of a Ridiculous Man Illustrated written by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Peters burg. He is contemplating the ridiculousness of his own life, and his recent realisation that nothing matters to him any more. It is this revelation that leads him to the idea of suicide. He reveals that, some months before, he had bought a revolver with the intent of shooting himself in the head.Despite a dismal night, the narrator looks up to the sky and views a solitary star. Shortly after seeing the star, a little girl comes running towards him. The narrator surmises that something is wrong with the girl's mother. He shakes the girl away and continues on to his apartment.Once in his apartment, he sinks into a chair and places the gun on a table next to him. He hesitates to shoot himself because of a nagging feeling of guilt that has plagued him ever since he shunned the girl. The narrator grapples with internal questions for a few hours before falling asleep in the chair.He descends into a vivid dream. In the dream, he shoots himself in the heart. He dies but is still aware of his surroundings. He gathers that there is a funeral and that it is he who is being buried. After an indeterminate amount of time in his cold grave, water begins to drip down onto his eyelids.