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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9780810135697

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Reviews

"""This highly original book examines Dostoevsky's complex, multifaceted, and self-contradictory representations of selfhood as he tried to strike a balance between a fully autonomous, isolated self, and a self that is wholly dependent upon others."" — Kate Holland, author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre after the Great Reforms Reviewed in the TLS, October 2018 ""Over seven cogently argued chapters, Corrigan traces Dostoevsky’s exploration of the human mystery solely through the fiction and its attendant notebooks, which he quarries to excellent effect. In so doing, he leads us from an extended analysis of one of Dostoevsky’s earliest and least celebrated works, “A Weak Heart” (the moving tale of a lowly civil servant’s inability “to withstand his own happiness”), all the way to The Brothers Karwnazov, unearthing a consistent picture of the damaged human subject through recurring patterns that Corrigan appears to have been the first to notice. The methodology, too, is innovative: rather than centring his study on the mid-period masterpieces Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, Corrigan uses them as “touch stones” by which to test this continuity. If one ends the book itching to relate Corrigan’s findings back to Dostoevsky himself, his life and his eventual views on God and nation, that is merely testimony to their explanatory force (Dostoevsky’s novels, not incidentally, have a similar effect). [...] Yuri Corrigan has written a stunning companion to one of the great literary edifices. Like the novels themselves, and like the towering enclosed courtyards of St Petersburg that Dostoevsky knew so well, his monograph is narrow but deep. [...] Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self is eloquent testimony to the flourishing of North American scholarship on Russian nineteenth-century literature over the past several decades, and proof that the tradition has been successfully passed on to the youngest generation represented by Corrigan and his peers, many of them published in this same series from Northwestern University Press."""

This highly original book examines Dostoevsky's complex, multifaceted, and self-contradictory representations of selfhood as he tried to strike a balance between a fully autonomous, isolated self, and a self that is wholly dependent upon others. - Kate Holland, author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre after the Great Reforms

This highly original book examines Dostoevsky's complex, multifaceted, and self-contradictory representations of selfhood as he tried to strike a balance between a fully autonomous, isolated self, and a self that is wholly dependent upon others. - Kate Holland, author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre after the Great Reforms Reviewed in the TLS, October 2018 Over seven cogently argued chapters, Corrigan traces Dostoevsky's exploration of the human mystery solely through the fiction and its attendant notebooks, which he quarries to excellent effect. In so doing, he leads us from an extended analysis of one of Dostoevsky's earliest and least celebrated works, A Weak Heart (the moving tale of a lowly civil servant's inability to withstand his own happiness ), all the way to The Brothers Karwnazov, unearthing a consistent picture of the damaged human subject through recurring patterns that Corrigan appears to have been the first to notice. The methodology, too, is innovative: rather than centring his study on the mid-period masterpieces Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, Corrigan uses them as touch stones by which to test this continuity. If one ends the book itching to relate Corrigan's findings back to Dostoevsky himself, his life and his eventual views on God and nation, that is merely testimony to their explanatory force (Dostoevsky's novels, not incidentally, have a similar effect). [...] Yuri Corrigan has written a stunning companion to one of the great literary edifices. Like the novels themselves, and like the towering enclosed courtyards of St Petersburg that Dostoevsky knew so well, his monograph is narrow but deep. [...] Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self is eloquent testimony to the flourishing of North American scholarship on Russian nineteenth-century literature over the past several decades, and proof that the tradition has been successfully passed on to the youngest generation represented by Corrigan and his peers, many of them published in this same series from Northwestern University Press.

Author Information

Yuri Corrigan is an assistant professor of Russian and comparative literature at Boston University.

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