Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph.D.)--Northwestern University, 2001.

Dostoevsky Sober Hope: Finding Faith in the Bleak Midwinter As winter descends to end the year 2023, it is a time for contemplation: a time to revel in the joys and find balm for the woes of the past year, a time to find the courage to hold on, and the hope to thrive in the new year. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) faced his own bleak (and Russian!) winters, from childhood play amongst the impoverished at his father’s medical clinic to a last minute reprieve from the Tsar’s firing squad for discussing banned books followed by ten years of prison camp and military service in exile. While his novels, such as Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov demonstrate human depravity they also give glimmers of grace, love, and beauty which have made him one of the most beloved novelists of all time. It is our hope that as you find time to relax during the holiday season (making it a habit for the new year!), that you will find these discussions deeply meaningful. Awaiting for you within are discussions of his characters from novels and short stories alike, Dostoevsky-inspired poems, and reviews of films, books, and even contemporary music which reflect the light and warmth he dared to find in his own bleak winter. CONTRIBUTORS * "Dostoevsky for Our Times" by Editorial introduction by Seth Myers. DOSTOEVSKY: THE FUNDAMENTALS * "Dostoevsky the Culturally Active Christian" by William Collen * "Dostoevsky's Narrative of (Un)Belief: From Psychology to Theology" by John Givens * "Underground Apologetics" by George Scondras * "A Midterm in Russian Literature" by Tom Sims THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV * "The Brothers Karamazov and the Existential Problem of Atheism" by Josiah Peterson * "Fifty Shades of Bleak: The Karamazov Principle Explored" by Matthew Lilley * "Dear, Kind God: A Divine Dilemma" by Grant Walker Broadhurst THE IDIOT * "Beauty in Tragedy: The Idiot, Dostoevsky, and Eucatastrophe" by Clark Weidner * "Interpreting Prince Myshkin: The Idiot" by Joshua Jo Wah Yen CRIME AND PUNISHMENT * "What Would I Be Without God?" by Sojourna Howfree * "By Their Fruit: An Allegorical Tale" by Brian Melton SHORT STORIES AND POEMS *"Crazy Love: The Action and Call of Grace in Dostoevsky's 'The Dream of the Ridiculous Man'" by Theresa Pihl * "The Heart of Christ and Dostoevsky's 'The Christmas Tree and a Wedding'" by Christy Luis * "2057 Carnot Street" by Patricia Newberry * "Another Magi's Journey" by Awara Fernandez * "Necropolis and the Soul's Well" by Katie Windham REVIEWS * "From Literature to Film: Adapting Dostoevsky's Works" by Mary Lou Cornish * "Soul Survival Kit: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky" by Seth Myers . * "Dostoevsky, Man About Town: Gulags, Muscovite Gentlemen, and Murakami" by Seth Myers * "Review of James Scanlan's Dostoevsky the Thinker," by Seth Myers * "Dostoevsky in Midnights' Metropolis: Midnights' Anti-Hero and Marvel-ous Heroes" by Seth Myers Volume 6, Issue 4, Advent 2024 330 pages Cover Image: Riz Crescini

Recognized as one of the greatest novelists of all-time, Fyodor Dostoevsky continues to inspire and instigate questions about religion, philosophy, and literature. However, there has been a neglect looking at his political thought: its philosophical and religious foundations, its role in nineteenth-century Europe, and its relevance for us today. Dostoevsky’s Political Thought explores Dostoevsky’s political thought in his fictional and nonfictional works with contributions from scholars of political science, philosophy, history, and Russian Studies. From a variety of perspectives, these scholars contribute to a greater understanding of Dostoevsky not only as a political thinker but also as a writer, philosopher, and religious thinker.

Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.

The book is a substantial contribution to international Dostoevsky research, exploring Dostoevsky’s contemporary relevance from a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective. It offers some fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s texts, presenting new complex studies on the writer and his works in the mirror of several arts of the last three decades. The book is divided into three Parts, featuring researchers from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine. Part One deals with conceptual issues, treating Dostoevsky above all as a prophet and philosopher, and thus determines the ideological system of coordinates for the studies presented in the rest of the book. Part Two examines Dostoevsky’s legacy through the lenses of literary theory, music, and Illustration art, and Part Three, via world cinema and theatre. The volume has gathered together an array of original and innovative studies from world leading experts in Dostoevsky’s creative universe, to make an authoritative input into the field.

Narrative Faith engages with the dynamics of doubt and faith to consider how literary works with complex structures explore different moral visions. The study describes a literary petite histoire that problematizes faith in two ways—both in the themes presented in the story, and the strategies used to tell that story—leading readers to doubt the narrators and their narratives. Starting with Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), a literary work that has captivated and confounded critics and readers for well over a century, the study examines Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Penitent (1973/83), works by twentieth-century authors who similarly intensify questions of faith through narrators that generate doubt. The two postwar novelists share parallel preoccupations with Dostoevsky’s art and similar personal philosophies, while their works constitute two literary responses to the cataclysm of the Second World War—extending questions of faith into the current era. The book’s last section looks beyond narrative inquiry to consider themes of confession and revision that appear in all three novels and open onto horizons beyond faith and doubt—to hope.

This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.