Between Religion and Rationality: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture

Between Religion and Rationality: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture

Joseph Frank

Language: English

Pages: 312

ISBN: 0691145660

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this book, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank explores some of the most important aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian culture, literature, and history. Delving into the distinctions of the Russian novel as well as the conflicts between the religious peasant world and the educated Russian elite, Between Religion and Rationality displays the cogent reflections of one of the most distinguished and versatile critics in the field.

Frank's essays provide a discriminating look at four of Dostoevsky's most famous novels, discuss the debate between J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa on the issue of Dostoevsky and evil, and confront Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism. The collection also examines such topics as Orlando Figes's sweeping survey of the history of Russian culture, the life of Pushkin, and Oblomov's influence on Samuel Beckett. Investigating the omnipresent religious theme that runs throughout Russian culture, even in the antireligious Chekhov, Frank argues that no other major European literature was as much preoccupied as the Russian with the tensions between religion and rationality. Between Religion and Rationality highlights this unique quality of Russian literature and culture, offering insights for general readers and experts alike.

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sense of alienation expressed in this story is made all the more poignant, as in Kafka, because of the withering banality of the circumstances in which he is forced to survive. Clarence Brown was perfectly right to have included “Pkhentz,” as an undisputed masterpiece, in his Viking Portable Reader of twentieth-century Russian literature. Since emerging from prison, Sinyavsky has published a number of important works that can only be mentioned here very briefly. His A Voice from the Chorus is

“perry,” who turns up whenever he is necessary, and excuses the plethora of coincidences arising from his use because it leads to some first-rate scenes (such as the death of the desolate young streetsweeper Jo). He also points out an interesting anomaly: Esther as narrator recounts incidents involving Woodcourt at which she was not present. Only Woodcourt could have told her about them, and such knowledge thus foreshadows their future marriage long before it takes place. There are many more

humor in; the idiot as a Christ figure; Ippolit in; Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in; Lebedev in; love theme in; Marie in; minor characters as the opposites of Myshkin in; moral extremism in; narratives of minor characters in; Nastasya Filippovna in; Prince Myshkin in; Prince Myshkin’s involvement with Aglaia in; Radomsky in; revisions to; Rogozhin in Ilarionov, Andrei Inquiry, The (A. Kovner) Intelligentsia of Great Britain, The (Mirsky) Iser, Wolfgang Island of Sakhalin, The

Dostoevsky solved the problem that had been troubling him subliminally, and he kept his promise to Katkov that he would furnish enough text to begin publishing by January 1871. Even though Dostoevsky’s writing went smoothly from this time on, his problems with the novel were by no means over. A good part of Demons was published in installments during 1871, despite the disturbance caused by the Dostoevskys’ return to Russia in July (the manuscripts of The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, and the early

Scriabin (to whose museum Stravinsky made a pilgrimage in 1962), and poets like Pasternak and Mayakovsky. After the revolution, “it became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a city of modernity and of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted to build” (214). Tatlin designed a monument, never built, to express these ambitions—“a giant striding figure to be made out of steel and iron girders, tiered and rounded like the churches of medieval Muscovy” (215). The ancient

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