воскресенье, 24 марта 2019 г.

Comparing Degradation in Crime and Punishment, the Possessed, and the Brothers Karamazov :: comparison compare contrast essays

How much dissipation can a market-gardening endure before it reaches the point of irreversible decay? The degree of disintegration and destruction that our own culture has experienced is probably not only fully known, but mid-to late-Nineteenth Century Russian culture is another matter. The woeful nature of the attacks upon the old forms of Russian culture, especially those waged by the Nihilists of the late 1860s, provides broad material for exploring this important question. Fortunately, for those anxious about the condition of our own culture, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, the nigh sagacious student of political economy in the Russia of the 1840s,1 unbroken his hand to the pulse of Russias intelligentsia. Dostoevskys preoccupation with that same question is understandable condition the exigencies of Russian life in his time. When, in l861, the Tsar-Emancipator, Alexander II, liberated the serfs, repressed forces for social change were unleashed. In Dostoevsky The Stir of Liberati on 1860-65, 2 Joseph blunt notes All the ideals on which previous Russian life had been founded were called into question important voices were heard proclaiming that an entirely new moral basis must be sought on which to construct human society. Russian culture so entered an acute phase of crisis. According to Professor Frank, the scenario described above is the all important(p) context within which the works of Dostoevsky must be understood. Utopian Socialism, favourite among the intelligentsia in the early l840s, was grounded in Christian social-moral ideals. By the mid-40s, however, the Christian elements were discounted and replaced with principles more consistent with Naturalism--science and reason. By the time Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs in l861, a new generation of liberals had evolved by side by side(p) the tenets of scientific materialism. This new generation of Russian intelligentsia were radicals known as the raznochintsy. The raznochintsy differed from the Socialists of the l840s in two ways they were more frustrated and more activist. The almost frustrated and activist elements of theraznochintsy eventually broke with their counterparts--these were the Nihilists. The Nihilists were the focal point of Dostoevskys later on work and, for that matter, much of the social-cultural work of the late 1860s. Dostoevskys three great novels, evil and Punishment, the Possessed, and the Brothers Karamazov, represent a continuum. That is, in those works, Dostoevsky traces the degenerative effects on the Russian psyche of the doctrines of radical and Nihilistic idealogues by beginning with a psychoanalytic study of one solitary man and then chronicles the movement of that crisis from the intelligentsia outward to the masses.

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