DOSTOEVSKY: BETWEEN MARGINALITY AND MADNESS in Spring 2019 (CL3056)

The intellectual anti-heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels, novellas, and short stories from the period beginning in 1864 have left a more decisive and enduring mark on Western culture than those of any other Russian writer. The author’s struggles with poverty, poor health, imprisonment, epilepsy, and gambling led him to question the existence of any social, moral, or metaphysical order. His underground characters, divided between reason and will, confront lust, despair, schizophrenia, and insanity, sometimes descending into sado-masochism, rape, murder, and suicide. We will read this powerful fiction with an eye first to its Russian context and then to a sampling of its international repercussions (Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky; Faulkner, Sartre, Bernhard …).