Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Family ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Law ◽  
Utopian Thought

In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky uses the commission of a double-murder to initiate and organize a diverse set of philosophical reflections. This volume contains seven essays that approach the novel through philosophical themes in order to offer both readings of the text and continuations of its reflections. The topics addressed include Dostoevsky’s presentation of mind and psychological investigation, as well as the nature of self-knowledge; emotions, in particular guilt and love, and their role in overcoming ambivalence toward existence; the nature of agency; the metaphysical conditions of freedom and the possibility of evil; the family and the failure of utopian thought; individuality and the authority of the law; and Bakhtin’s conceptions of dialogue and polyphony and his views of the self and generative time.

Buried Narratives: Exhuming the Mother's Story in Oliver Twist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Maternal Inheritance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
First Time ◽  
Critical Consideration

Initially, Oliver Twist (1839) might seem representative of the archetypal male social plot, following an orphan and finding him a place by discovering the father and settling the boy within his inheritance. But Agnes Fleming haunts this narrative, undoing its neat, linear transmission. This reconsideration of maternal inheritance and plot in the novel occurs against the backdrop of legal and social change. I extend the critical consideration of the novel's relationship to the New Poor Law by thinking about its reflection on the bastardy clauses. And here, of course, is where the mother enters. Under the bastardy clauses, the responsibility for economic maintenance of bastard children was, for the first time, legally assigned to the mother, relieving the father of any and all obligation. Oliver Twist manages to critique the bastardy clauses for their release of the father, while simultaneously embracing the placement of the mother at the head of the family line. Both Oliver and the novel thus suggest that it is the mother's story that matters, her name through which we find our own. And by containing both plots – that of the father and the mother – Oliver Twist reveals the violence implicit in traditional modes of inheritance in the novel and under the law.

scholarly journals Empowerment and Collaborative Agency in Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Maher Ben Moussa
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relation Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Child Agency ◽  
The Family

This article examines the issue of child agency and empowerment in Mildred’s D. Taylor’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. This theme is addressed by some critics who come to the conclusion that Taylor’s protagonist, the young girl Cassie Logan, develops agency and subversive subjectivity in the course of the novel. This study challenges such readings to argue that the ending of Taylor’s novel does not reflect empowerment; and consequently does not support such conclusions. Through expanding self-in-relation theory to feminism as an interpretive tool, this paper suggests that Cassie Logan’s subversive agency remains partial and incomplete because she fails to engage in an inter-connected and constructive relationship with the ‘other’. Cassie’s empowerment is partial because she fails to exert it in the larger community of African Americans and whites, that otherwise could have stimulated a greater impetus for activism. This study concludes that agency and subjectivity are constructed and empowered within the community which is larger than the self and the family.  

“The Continuity of Married Companionship”

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Focus Questions

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.

scholarly journals “EVANGELICAL TEXT” OF THE NOVEL “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT” IN VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-152
Author(s):  
Nguyen Thi Hoan ◽  
Galina G. Yermilova
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
First Time

The article for the first time explores the translation of the ‟evangelical text” of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel ‟Crime and Punishment” into Vietnamese. The ‟evangelical text” refers to the New Testament quotations, for the first time both in the writer’s work and in the Russian literature of the 19th century as a whole, widely used by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Threeauthoritative translations by Trương Định Cư (1972), Lý Quốc Sinh (1973), Cao Xuân Hạo (1982-1983) are involved. The translation of the Bible into Vietnamese used by translators and involved in the liturgical practice of the Vietnamese Orthodox Church, has been revealed. On the basis of a continuous text sample of the «evangelical text» three translations were compared with the original and reverse translations, followed by an analytical commentary. The subject of the article is a monologue of «drunken» Semyon Marmeladov in the tavern (p. 1, ch. 2), saturated with New Testament quotations, and an evangelical scene about raised Lazarus (p. 4, ch. 4). It is concluded that when translating the «evangelical text» of the novel, the Vietnamese translators experienced serious difficulties due to ignorance of Russian Orthodoxy, which is still perceived in Vietnam to this day as a kind of exotic. Some specific refinements to existing translations are proposed.

scholarly journals Rodion Raskolnikov's dreams in Vietnamese translation

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-155
Author(s):  
Nguyễn Thị Hoan ◽  
Galina G. Yermilova
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Semantic Richness ◽  
Text Selection

Rodion Raskolnikov's dreams in Vietnamese translation The article analyses the Vietnamese translations of excerpts about the dreams of Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of the novel "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is these dreams that are narrated with high semantic richness as they explain the reason why the hero was driven to commit the felony. Three available Vietnamese translations of the novel have been included for analysis. As a result of the preliminary solid text selection and the followed analysis of the original and translated texts, we came to the conclusion that the translators experienced the greatest challenges in conveying the realia of the mid 19th-century Russian people’s religious and everyday life as well as the ontological issues in the novel. Some specific clarifications are suggested for unclear content in the available translations.

The Noose Hidden Under Flowers: Marriage and Law in Saint Ronan’s Well

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Point ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Waverley Novels ◽  
The Law ◽  
Harsh Critique

This chapter explores issues of the law on marriage in novels by Sir Walter Scott, focusing on Saint Ronan's Well. In a number of ways, Scott's novels can be viewed as offering a commentary on Scots law and society. Legal themes that emerge from them can indicate more general contemporary legal concerns. This general point has been demonstrated in Bruce Beiderwell's argument that the Waverley novels made an important contribution to general discourse about crime and punishment at a crucial period in the development of new penal strategies and of reform in the criminal law. The chapter argues that the theme of marriage is central to Saint Ronan's Well and shows that the novel offers a harsh critique of aspects of the Scots law on the constitution of marriage and, at another level, of that other union — the political one of Scotland with England.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT ‘TEA’ IN THE NOVELS ‘THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD’ AND ‘CRIME AND PUNISHMENT’ BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-88
Author(s):  
Ivan V. Burdin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Internal Clock ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Absolute Value ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Dead

The article deals with the concept ‘tea’ in two works by Fyodor Dostoevsky – the novels The House of the Dead (1860–1861) and Crime and Punishment (1865–1866).In these works, the concept ‘tea’ includes both traditional representations – ‘tea as an element of everyday life’, ‘tea as part of a meal’, ‘tea as an attribute of friendship and communication’ – and new ones created by Dostoevsky, such as ‘tea for thought’, ‘tea as medicine and a source of strength’, ‘tea as a source of spiritual balance’). An important representation for the psychological line of the works is ‘tea as a chronometer’ – when the heroes check their internal clock with the tea time, as well as with the temperature of tea as it is becoming cold. The paper gives particular attention to the representation ‘tea as a marker of wealth’. In the novel The House of the Dead it is presented through the scenes where guests are being entertained to tea and through descriptions of the quality of the drink, in the novel Crime and Punishment – through the representation ‘tea as luxury’.The paper establishes the role of the concept ‘tea’ in conveying the main author's idea in the works by Dostoevsky. Along with other concepts presented in the text, such as wine, tobacco, food, cards etc., tea in The House of the Dead is intended to show readers the contrast between freedom and prison, contributes to the translation of the idea of freedom as absolute value. Meant to depict a special state of life – on the border of the light and darkness, life and death, wealth and poverty, the representations of the concept ‘tea’ in Crime and Punishment greatly contribute to the depiction of Raskolnikov's mental state, fit into the semantics of St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky.

Raskolnikov’s Breaking the Law

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Jordi Morillas
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Law ◽  
Marxist Interpretation

In this article we analyse the Marxist interpretation of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Although Raskolnikov’s worldview may share some features with a socialist point of view, the hero of Dostoevsky’s first novel of ideas represents a complete ideological antithesis to Socialism. Thanks to a careful analysis of Raskolnikov’s utterances and with the help of Merezhkovsky’s reading of the novel, we conclude that if there is a Dostoevsky novel which resists a Socialist understanding, then this novel is Crime and Punishment.

scholarly journals From Hamlet to Holmes: literary detective tradition

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S1) ◽  
pp. 1087-1099
Author(s):  
SeyedehZahra Nozen ◽  
Hamlet Isaxanli ◽  
Bahman Amani
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
The Public ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Auguste Dupin ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Agatha Christie

Exposed to the mystery of his father’s suspicious death, young Hamlet followed the riddle of solving it in the longest tragedy of Shakespeare. By suspension and the lengthy nature of detective works, Shakespeare seems to have initiated a new subgenre in drama which may have later on been converted into an independent subgenre in the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie through their imaginative characters, Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and the pair of Hercules Poirot with Miss Marple respectively. Fyodor Dostoevsky may have also spread the net of Hamletian subtext in his Crime and Punishment. Plotting a perfect crime by the murderers and the public approval of the plan, on one hand, and the inconvincible mind of the hero which ultimately undo the seemingly unsolvable puzzle, on the other, construct the very core of all aforementioned works of Shakespeare, Poe, and Doyle. The unanticipated and unpredicted findings of either Holmes or Hamlet defeat the expectations of the audience and bring the runaway justice back to her groom. 

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