Author: Fyodor DostoyevskyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
Author: Fyodor DostoyevskyPublisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810115187
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 94
Book Description
In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited a number of major cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Vienna. He recorded his impressions in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which were first published in the February 1863 issue of Vremya (Time), the periodical of which he was the editor.
Another Freedom
Author: Svetlana BoymPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226069753
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
The word “freedom” is so overly used—and frequently abused—that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché. In Another Freedom, Svetlana Boym offers us a refreshing new portrait of the age-old concept. Exploring the rich cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day, she argues that our attempts to imagine freedom should occupy the space of not only “what is” but also “what if.” Beginning with notions of sacrifice and the emergence of a public sphere for politics and art, Boym expands her account to include the relationships between freedom and liberation, modernity and terror, and political dissent and creative estrangement. While depicting a world of differences, she affirms lasting solidarities based on the commitment to the passionate thinking that reflections on freedom require. To do so, Boym assembles a remarkable cast of characters: Aeschylus and Euripides, Kafka and Mandelstam, Arendt and Heidegger, and a virtual encounter between Dostoevsky and Marx on the streets of Paris. By offering a fresh look at the strange history of this idea, Another Freedom delivers a nuanced portrait of freedom, one whose repercussions will be felt well into the future.
The Cult of the Ego
Author: Eugene GoodheartPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351305026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
Goethe once remarked that "every emancipation of the spirit is pernicious unless there is a corresponding growth of control." This remark may be taken as a motto for Eugene Goodheart's study of an aspect of the cultural history of the past two hundred years. In separate chapters on Rousseau, Stendhal, Goethe and Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Lawrence, and Joyce, Goodheart discovers a community of concern which he calls the cult of the ego. All these writers examined here in one way or another deal with "the emancipation of the spirit" with all its promise and danger. The characteristic attempt is to "extend the boundaries of the self by going beyond the area of safety" and. thereby risking even the destruction of the self. They advance the claims of the self at the same time seeking the controls that will secure these claims. The artist-hero becomes the central figure in Goodheart's volume, since it is he who comes to exemplify the possibilities of the cult of the ego. Their efforts, Goodheart argues, have ambiguous results. The seeds of contemporary nihilism are in the failures of these writers to master the chaos of egoism, which they helped engender. But their heroism was partly in the effort of resistance: moral, religious, aesthetic. In a large portion of modern literature, resistance has been abandoned either out of exhaustion or out of fascination with the destructive tendency of modern life: in Beckett's phrase, "a world endlessly collapsing." In his introduction to this first paperback edition, Goodheart discusses the book's origin in relation to the counter-cultural unrest of 1968 when it was first published and weighs its theme of the emancipated self against current postmodern assertions of the "death of the author." The Cult of the Ego is written with admirable clarity and economy. Its interests are literary, moral and political. Moving freely and knowledgeably among various national literatures, Goodheart has made an original and valuable contribution to the field of comparative literature. Eugene Goodheart is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University. Among his books are Novel Practices: Classic Modern Fiction, Modernism and the Critical Spirit, Culture and the Radical Conscience, and Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir, all available from Transaction.
Dostoevsky the Thinker
Author: James Patrick ScanlanPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
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.
The Cult of the Ego
Author: Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412836449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Goethe once remarked that "every emancipation of the spirit is pernicious unless there is a corresponding growth of control." This remark may be taken as a motto for Eugene Goodheart's study of an aspect of the cultural history of the past two hundred years. In separate chapters on Rousseau, Stendhal, Goethe and Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Lawrence, and Joyce, Goodheart discovers a community of concern which he calls the cult of the ego. All these writers examined here in one way or another deal with "the emancipation of the spirit" with all its promise and danger. The characteristic attempt is to "extend the boundaries of the self by going beyond the area of safety" and. thereby risking even the destruction of the self. They advance the claims of the self at the same time seeking the controls that will secure these claims. The artist-hero becomes the central figure in Goodheart's volume, since it is he who comes to exemplify the possibilities of the cult of the ego. Their efforts, Goodheart argues, have ambiguous results. The seeds of contemporary nihilism are in the failures of these writers to master the chaos of egoism, which they helped engender. But their heroism was partly in the effort of resistance: moral, religious, aesthetic. In a large portion of modern literature, resistance has been abandoned either out of exhaustion or out of fascination with the destructive tendency of modern life: in Beckett's phrase, "a world endlessly collapsing." In his introduction to this first paperback edition, Goodheart discusses the book's origin in relation to the counter-cultural unrest of 1968 when it was first published and weighs its theme of the emancipated self against current postmodern assertions of the "death of the author." The Cult of the Ego is written with admirable clarity and economy. Its interests are literary, moral and political. Moving freely and knowledgeably among various national literatures, Goodheart has made an original and valuable contribution to the field of comparative literature. Eugene Goodheart is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University. Among his books are Novel Practices: Classic Modern Fiction, Modernism and the Critical Spirit, Culture and the Radical Conscience, and Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir, all available from Transaction.
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: New Translation
Author: Fyodor DostoevskyPublisher: Alma Classics
ISBN: 9781847496188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited a number of major cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Vienna. His impressions on what he saw, "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", were first published in the February 1863 issue of Vremya (Time), the periodical he edited.
A Soviet Journey
Author: Alex La GumaPublisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498536034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.
Banned Emotions
Author: Laura OtisPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190698926
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
Who benefits and who loses when emotions are described in particular ways? How do metaphors such as "hold on" and "let go" affect people's emotional experiences? Banned Emotions, written by neuroscientist-turned-literary scholar Laura Otis, draws on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to challenge popular attempts to suppress certain emotions. This interdisciplinary book breaks taboos by exploring emotions in which people are said to "indulge": self-pity, prolonged crying, chronic anger, grudge-bearing, bitterness, and spite. By focusing on metaphors for these emotions in classic novels, self-help books, and popular films, Banned Emotions exposes their cultural and religious roots. Examining works by Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Forster, and Woolf in parallel with Bridesmaids, Fatal Attraction, and Who Moved My Cheese?, Banned Emotions traces pervasive patterns in the ways emotions are represented that can make people so ashamed of their feelings, they may stifle emotions they need to work through. The book argues that emotion regulation is a political as well as a biological issue, affecting not only which emotions can be expressed, but who can express them, when, and how.
The Gambler Wife
Author: Andrew D. KaufmanPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525537155
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE PEN JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY “Feminism, history, literature, politics—this tale has all of that, and a heroine worthy of her own turn in the spotlight.” —Therese Anne Fowler, bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky’s life—and became a pioneer in Russian literary history In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described “girl of the sixties,” Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky—a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist—had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction. Yet in person she found the writer “terribly unhappy, broken, tormented,” weakened by epilepsy, and yoked to a ruinous gambling addiction. Alarmed by his condition, Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business manager—launching one of literature’s most turbulent and fascinating marriages. The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist’s freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters—her husband’s and her own. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman reveals how Anna protected her family from creditors, demanding in-laws, and her greatest romantic rival, through years of penury and exile. We watch as she navigates the writer’s self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe—even hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herself—until his addiction is conquered. And, finally, we watch as Anna frees her husband from predatory contracts by founding her own publishing house, making Anna the first solo female publisher in Russian history. The result is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russia—and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.
