![]() Listen to these passages where Birmingham imagines that moment of exile: It was the 28-year-old Dostoevsky's reading aloud at a political meeting of a so-called "impertinent" and "freethinking" letter - written by someone else - that led to his arrest and exile to Siberia in 1849. Birmingham explores the radical political fervor that almost destroyed Dostoevsky's life. Then there's the dangerous world of politics. In particular, he explores the real-life career of a Parisian poet-murderer named Pierre-François Lacenaire, who inspired the character of Raskolnikov. We hear about Dostoevsky's noble-but-precarious background his friends, mistresses and love of gambling.īirmingham also widens the scope of his narrative, tracing the emergence of what we would call "true crime" literature in the 19 th century. To dramatize how such a strange tale came to be, Birmingham, as you'd expect, delves into Dostoevsky's early life. His angle of approach on Crime and Punishment is that Dostoevsky's revolutionary subject in that novel is consciousness itself - specifically, how the idealistic murderer, Raskolnikov, is captivated by free-floating political and philosophical ideas that cause him to see himself and the world off-kilter. By the end of his own superb books on those "masterpieces," Birmingham makes the case that no other word will do.īook Reviews 'Most Dangerous Book': A Rich Treasury Charting James Joyce's 'Ulysses' These days, the word "masterpiece" is also regarded - in the academy at least - as a quaint cliché, but Birmingham throws it down when referring to novels like Ulysses and Crime and Punishment. These are not new subjects but Birmingham writes the kind of deeply researched and deeply felt literary biographies for which clichéd rave terms, "immersive" and "reads like a novel" were coined. for over 10 years after the completion of its serialization in 1920.īirmingham's latest book, The Sinner and The Saint, gives the same treatment to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. His first, The Most Dangerous Book, was a bestselling critically lauded account of how James Joyce came to write Ulysses and the censorship battles that prevented that novel from being published in the U.S. ![]() Vinitsky also proposes that the comic narrator of "Bobok" can be seen as a literary mask of Dostoevskii himself, who employs philosophical irony as a means of conveying a metaphysical message in the age of positivism and disbelief.There's something audaciously old-fashioned about Kevin Birmingham's biographies of great novels. In addition to examining the ideological and artistic origins of Fedor Dostoevskii's portrayal of the underworld in his short "cemetery story" "Bobok" (1873), Ilya Vinitsky probes the theosophical context of Dostoevskii's "fantastic realism." Vinitsky considers this story a programmatic "theosophical menippea" that artistically "voices" and "tests" Emanuel Swedenborg's doctrine of posthumous self-exposure of the wicked souls who are no longer restrained by "fear of the law, of the loss of reputation, of honor, and of life" and laugh shamelessly "at honesty and justice." Vinitsky argues that Dostoevskii was interested in Swedenborg's spiritual psychologism as an epistemological method and contends that Swedenborg's interpretation of devils as former humans, with their "earthly" consciousness, inner sufferings, and memories, perfectly corresponded to Dostoevskii's symbolic anthropology.
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