Dead Ends In Dostoevsky
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Date
1976
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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine those cul-de-sac images in Dostoevsky's major novels in which the villains--principally Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Stavrogin in The Possessed, and Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov--destroy themselves, dramatically illustrating what Dostoevsky saw as the meaning of human existence without God. Critics looking upon Dostoevsky as a philosopher, a religious prophet, a psychologist, or a social thinker, usually overlook the most obvious fact about Dostoevsky--the fact that he wrote novels. Therefore, as Ernest J. Simmons, Rene Wellek, and Edward Wasiolek maintain, Dostoevsky should be considered primarily as "a novelist, a supreme creator of a world of imagination, an artist with a deep insight into human conduct and the perennial condition of man.”¹ My intention is to focus on this world of imagination, this labyrinthine universe of Dostoevsky's, and to show that this particular dead-end imagery--such as walls, sordid little rooms, corners filled with spiders--is a rich concretization of Dostoevskian themes, mirroring the nature of certain characters and intensifying the dramatic situations. In addition I intend to examine dead-endness as it applies on a higher level to the novels themselves. An evolving moral and spiritual vision characterizes Dostoevsky's novels. As he is a novelist of ideas, he can be seen implementing those ideas in characters and dramatic plots, working with them, shaping and and expanding and exploring their consequences. Each novel, taken as a whole, is a larger statement; as a world of moral imagination each is either open-ended or closed. This means that Dostoevsky explores the solutions and/or the lack of solutions to the moral dilemmas of his heroes and villains. The particular dead-end images, then, are parts of a wider picture as the corner of a room is part of a mansion.
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Program year: 1975/1976
Digitized from print original stored in HDR
Digitized from print original stored in HDR
Keywords
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, imagery, labyrinth, dead ends, moral imagination