Overview

Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche. Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

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9780810135703

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Reviews

Strikingly original and marvelously written, Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self not only solves the riddle of Dostoevsky's conception of the self, but also provides a wealth of new insights into his works. Corrigan's study is likely to become an event in the field. What is more, it has the potential to be read beyond the circle of Dostoevsky scholars: students and general readers will find the book accessible, provoking, and inspiring. This is a major achievement in Dostoevsky scholarship. --Irina Paperno, author of Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia and Who, What Am I? Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self

Author Information

YURI CORRIGAN is an assistant professor of Russian and comparative literature at Boston University.

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