From the gambler within: Dostoyevsky's The Gambler

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanju George
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Fyodor Dostoyevsky ◽  
Gambling Addiction ◽  
Central Theme

SummaryFyodor Dostoyevsky is widely regarded as the greatest 19th-century Russian writer and a giant in world literature. He is familiar to literary-inclined psychiatrists for his rich and accurate portrayal of mental illness in several of his works. But his own chronic addiction to gambling and its consequent perils are less well-known. This article discusses The Gambler, one of Dostoyevsky's early (1866) semi-autobiographical novellas, inspired by his own addiction to roulette, focusing on its depiction of gambling. To better understand Dostoyevsky the gambler, the article also presents brief excerpts from letters that he wrote to his wife in 1867, when his gambling addiction appears to have been at its worst. Finally, the relevance of the central theme of this work, gambling addiction, to the present-day psychiatrist is discussed.

scholarly journals Dostoyevsky and epilepsy: between science and mystique

2010 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antenilson Franklyn Rodrigues Lima ◽  
Dante Marcello Claramonte Gallian
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Graduate Program ◽  
Fyodor Dostoyevsky ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Mystic Experience ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Narrative

This article, the result of a research project presented as a Master's degree dissertation in the graduate program of "Teaching of Health Education" at UNIFESP, seeks to highlight the pertinence of analyzing epilepsy and especially, the paradoxical experience of the epileptic individual through literary narrative. Using as its object the novel, The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it seeks to discuss the relationship between epilepsy and the mystic experience, bearing in mind the context of the scientific and humanistic perspectives of the 19th century and today.

Mesopotamian Archaeology: a review

Antiquity ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (88) ◽  
pp. 198-200
Author(s):  
V. Gordon Childe
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degree Of Maturity ◽  
Mesopotamian Archaeology

It is a mark of a discipline's maturity when scientists begin to show an interest in I the history of their science. This book by a distinguished archaeologist.might then be welcomed if only as a mark that archaeology has reached that degree of maturity. But of course the book's merits go far beyond that and will indeed appeal to many who are not archaeologists in any sense.The story of archaeological exploration in Mesopotamia is highly instructive and romantic, but also tragic. The author tells it well in an attractive prose style with a few happily chosen illustrations reproduced from early 19th century originals. More than half the volume is occupied by biographical accounts of those who laid the foundations of Western knowledge of the monuments of Iraq, from 16th century merchant-voyagers who casually mentioned them to Botta and Layard who began to excavate them. Lloyd has the power to pick out and vividly recapitulate such incidents in the actors’ lives as shall bring out their characters without distracting attention from the central theme. At the same time he uses their descriptions of scenery and customs, often sharply contrasted with those he knows so well today, to build up a rich and variegated panorama of the natural and human background of Mesopotamian archaeology. Students of Near Eastern civilization who have not themselves had the opportunity of visiting even Mosul, Baghdad, Ur and Basra will find these passages, in which 19th century observations are illuminated by comparison with contemporary experiences, extremely helpful.

scholarly journals Brahma Sutra and Vedadikara Nirupanam (Authoritarian Critique of Vedas)

2021 ◽  
pp. 160-163
Author(s):  
Dr. K. Mini
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Vedic Period ◽  
The Right ◽  
Pure Knowledge

The Vedas are one of the oldest manuscripts in the world literature. The word Veda is derived from the Sanskrit root ‘vid’ which means knowledge, but it could be attributed as a bundle of knowledge of the Vedic period. All the Indian chronicles and myths extol the Vedas. There is not even a single mantra anywhere in the sacred text repudiating anyone the right to become versed in Vedas but the authority to study and teach the Vedas abounding with knowledge, has been interpreted as the right of a monopolized community gradually. Prominent social reformers like Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda who visited India in the late 19th century argued that everyone has the right to study the Vedas. Meanwhile, Chattambi Swami wrote Vedadhikara Nirupanam, proclaiming that the right to study Veda belongs to everyone in Kerala. In this book, Chattambi Swami analyses extensively the question of who is qualified to study the Vedas and has explicitly established that everyone who has the desire to study the Vedas and the customs in rapport with it are eligible for the study. The dissension created by this work was tremendous during the time when the elite castes and scholars of the society strongly believed and argued that only Brahmins had the dominion to study the Vedas. Vyaptheshcha Samajasam is elaborated in the Brahma Sutras as follows. Para brahma swaroopi, Parameswaran (Lord Shiva) is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient and absolute. On account of this, it is equitable to say that even if there is a disparity in the name or context of the theosophical form of knowledge, the objective serves as the same. The purpose of all techniques is to illustrate the essence of God in copious ways. They all have similarities in it. Therefore every theosophy is analogous. After reflecting the Vedic forms and significance of the Vedas, Chattambi Swami encompasses the principles of Shruti(what is heard), Yukti(logic) and Anubhavam (experience) and depicts his own perceptions. Similarly, Swami meticulously discusses who is a Brahmin. For instance, Swami examines whether any of these qualities like pure knowledge, birth, noble action and self knowledge make a person a Brahmin or a combination of all these. From this discussion it is implicit that a Brahmin is only one who has wisdom and associated noble deeds. The dogma that the Shudrascannot be educated ‘nasthrishudrau vedamathiyatham’, this verse is neither a Veda nor a Smriti, it is just a sutra (aphorism).It is not accepted or studied anywhere in Shruti (what is heard) Smriti (what is recollected) mythological texts. Therefore, it does not have to be accepted as a doctrine. The verse means that women and Shudras need not have to study but it cannot be interpreted that they are incapable to learn. Even if it is argued that Shudras (lowest ranked of the four varnas of Hindu caste system) have no authority to study the Puranas, many of the authors of the Puranas are Shudras. The veracity of the matter cannot be denied. Most people know that the author of the Suta Samhita is also a Shudra. Ergo, the eminence of that book cannot be deemed as inferior. Parasaran, the son of Odakkari, and Vyasa, the son of Mukuvathi (fisherwoman) compiled the Vedas and were also Brahmins.

scholarly journals Quarantine as a tool of epidemic fight

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-195
Author(s):  
Renata E. Paliga
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Epidemiological Tool ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Economic Balance ◽  
The 19Th Century

Until the 19th century, the factor causing epidemics was not known, and the escape from a place where it occurred as well as isolation of patients was considered to be the only effective way to avoid illness and death. Quarantine in a sense similar to modern times was used in 1377 in Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik, during the plague epidemic. It was the first administratively imposed procedure in the world’s history. It was later used in Venice and other rich port cities in the Mediterranean. On the territory of today’s Poland, quarantine measures were used by the so-called Mayor of the Air – LukaszDrewno in 1623 during the plague epidemic in Warsaw. The quarantine left its mark on all areas of human activity. It affected all humanity in a way that is underestimated today. Throughout history, it has been described and presented visually. It is omnipresent in the world literature, art and philosophy. However, the isolation and closure of cities, limiting trade, had an impact on the economic balance, and the dilemma between the choice of inhabitants’ health and the quality of existence, i.e. their wealth, has been the subject of discussions since the Middle Ages. Since the end of the 19th century, quarantine has lost its practical meaning. The discovery of bacteria and a huge development of medical and social sciences allowed limiting its range. In the 20th century isolation and quarantine no longer had a global range, because the ability to identify factors causing the epidemic, knowledge about the incubation period, carrier, infectiousness, enabled the rational determination of its duration and territorial range. The modern SARS COV 2 pandemic has resulted in a global quarantine on a scale unprecedented for at least three hundred years. The aim of this paper is to present the history of quarantine from its beginning to the present day, including its usefulness as an epidemiological tool.

scholarly journals Caucasian child in the image of A.V. Druzhinin (based on the story “Madmoiselle Jeannette”)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 274-282
Author(s):  
Zukhra A. Kuchukova ◽  
◽  
Liana B. Berberova ◽  
Eset Kh. Mankieva ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Children's Narratives ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Caucasian Child ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Interethnic Communication

Within the framework of the emerging interdisciplinary scientific direction “conflictology”, the authors of the article consider the culture-forming and peacemaking potential of the image of a “child” based on the story of the Russian writer of the 19th century A.V. Druzhinin “Madmoiselle Jeannette”. As a prerequisite for the study, a brief overview of children’s narratives in world literature is given. The figurative field of the “Caucasian child”, taking into account the historical context, is made up of the following cultural and semantic components: “the child is a pacifist in its highest incarnation”, “the child is a symbol of a qualitatively new direction in life, not burdened by military conflicts”, “the child is an ideal and interethnic communication”.

Diagnostic Psychiatry

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Allan V. Horwitz
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Clinical Research ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
American Psychiatric Association ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
New System

Psychiatry faced a major predicament as it entered the 1970s: it lacked the disease conditions that would provide the field with medical legitimacy. The publication of the DSM-III by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 marked a thoroughgoing change in thinking about mental illness. In one stroke, psychiatry discarded one intellectual paradigm that had little concern with diagnosis and adopted an entirely new system of classification that imported a model from medicine where diagnosis is “the keystone of medical practice and clinical research.” The promulgators of the DSM-III overthrew the broad, vague, and often etiologically oriented concepts that were embodied in the DSM-I and DSM-II, reclaiming the diagnostic tradition that dominated 19th-century psychiatry. The fundamental principle of the new manual was to define distinct mental disorders through using observable clusters of symptoms without reference to their causes. The DSM-III created a powerful standardized system of diagnoses that reigned virtually unchallenged for the following three decades. It allowed psychiatry to reorganize itself from a discipline where diagnosis played a marginal role to one where it was the basis of the specialty. The DSM-III revolutionized conceptions of mental disorder through transforming conditions that had been thought to be distinctively psychosocial into ones that were disease-like states.

scholarly journals A zágrábi Tudományegyetem hungarológiai tanszékének története

Gerundium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-81
Author(s):  
István Lőkös
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
National Council ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Representative Volume ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hungarian Language ◽  
The University ◽  
The 19Th Century

The author gives an overview on the history of a quarter of a century of the youngest foreign workshop of Hungarian studies, namely, Department of Hungarian Language and Literature of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Zagreb. The education on Hungarian studies started in Zagreb in 1944 and was precedented. At the University of Zagreb the Hungarian Language Department was functioning as early as the second half of the 19th century. Form 1904 to 1918, for almost one and a half century at the same place Hungarian language and literature was educated with the direction of professor Dr. Kázmér Greska. After the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy the representatives of the Croatian National Council radically put out professor Greska from the university and closed down the department. It was impossible to reorganize it in Yugoslavia between the two world wars. A new possibility came only after the independence of Croatia in 1994. The work in the department restarted on the basis of an interstate contract under the leadership of professor Dr. Milka Jauk-Pinhak and with the partnership of visiting teachers from Hungary. Today, under the management of Orsolya Žagar-Szentesi, 25-30 students start their studies at the department in each year. The function of the special college of translation of poetic works is outstanding. The department in 2002 celebrated the 900 years jubilee of the coronation of Kálmán Könyves as Croatian king with the representative volume of essays entitled Croato-Hungarica. The department was introduced in the „Hungarian issue” of the journal Književna smotra, the Zagreb journal of world literature in 2014 on the 20th jubilee of the department. Their latest publication is With heart and Soul/ Dušom i srcem Hungarian-Croatian Somatic Phraseology/ Mađarsko-hrvatski rječnik somatskih frazema (2018).

scholarly journals An Analysis on The Daffodils and Wordsworth’s Romantic View of Nature

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Liu
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
New Era ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century

Wordsworth is the leading figure of English Romanticism in the 19th century and the most famous poet among the “Lake Poets”. He ushers in a new era of Romanticism for the English literature, and also exerts a great influence on the world literature. Most of his poems are about the natural scenery from which he explores its impact on human’s soul, so he has been regarded as “a poet of nature”. This thesis reveals the formation of the poet’s romantic view of nature and its demonstrations by analyzing one of his famous poems The Daffodils. 

scholarly journals ARCHETYPICAL CONSTANTS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE RUSSIAN NOVEL

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
Irina Belyaeva ◽  
Elżbieta Tyszkowska-Kasprzak
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Fear Of Falling ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Central Position ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Russian Novel ◽  
Literary Model

The article examines the correlation of the Russian classic novel with the Easter archetype dominant in Russian culture. The authors believe that the novel assumed a central position in the genre system of 19th century Russian literature, not only because of its natural openness, which allowed it to recreate life and man both in the general dimension and in private manifestations, but also because of the greatest responsiveness of this genre to the spiritual needs of Russian culture. The article examines the “plot space” of the Russian novel, which gravitates towards the archetypal model, actualizing the scenario of rehabilitation (Dostoevsky) / awakening (Goncharov), or salvation. Not only doesn’t the hero’s line in the Russian novel imply an end; moreover, as it lines up vertically, it suggests his rebirth to a “new life,” sometimes even posthumous, as was the case with Turgenev’s Bazarov, or through the fear of falling into the hellish abyss of modern life, as is it was with Oblomov. Using the example of novels by F. Dostoevsky, I. Turgenev, I. Goncharov and L. Tolstoy, the article demonstrates that the main mission of the hero of the Russian novel was that of personal salvation, the achievement of “new happiness” (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky), which is associated with forgiveness, a willingness to accept God and with the “new life.” The Easter nature of Russian culture predetermines the gravitation of the Russian classical novel (as a typological variety of the Russian novel) to the artistic realizations of the idea of salvation present in world literature in genres of a non-novel nature. The Russian novel primarily developed the storylines and motifs that originated in Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust, which suggested two options for personal salvation: the awareness of sins and “behind the door of the grave.” The second option was more relevant for the 19th century Russian novel. The savior hero, rooted in Cervantes’s novel, was also relevant for Russian literature, although not as popular. Taking into account the complex explorations of modern writers in the field of the novel genre, the authors conclude that there is a present-day connection with the Russian classic novel, i.e., in E. Vodolazkin’s prose: apparent signs of a “Dante plot” are present in the novel Lavr. Regardless of all the metamorphoses, the Russian classical novel is still a national literary model in the space of Russian culture.

scholarly journals Lithium Preparations in Psychiatry, Addiction Medicine and Neurology (To the 70th Anniversary of John Cade’s Discovery). Part I. History

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-80
Author(s):  
Roman A. Bekker ◽  
Yuriy V. Bykov
Keyword(s):  
Bipolar Disorder ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Mineral Waters ◽  
Mood Stabilizers ◽  
Lithium Salts ◽  
Therapeutic Action ◽  
Addiction Medicine ◽  
Depressive States

The use of lithium salts in psychiatry has a long, more than two-thousand-year history. It goes back to the ideas of Hippocrates II, Galen and Soran of Ephesus regarding the feasibility of using mineral waters from certain sources, which, as we know today, were rich in lithium, magnesium and bromine salts, for the treatment of both manic and depressive states. Later, this effect of lithium salts was rediscovered – independently of each other – in the mid-19th century by the American psychiatrist William Alexander Hammond and the Danish psychiatrist Carl Lange. However, since this discovery was based on incorrect premises, namely, on the theory of «brain urine acid diathesis» as the cause of mental illness, it was not accepted, ignored and even ridiculed by colleagues. The rediscovery of the anti-manic effect of lithium salts by John Cade in 1948 is one of the greatest discoveries of psychiatry of the 20th century.The mechanisms of lithium therapeutic action are complex, diverse and not fully understood to this day. Initially, John Cade suggested that this effect of lithium is associated with its deficiency in patients with bipolar disorder and that exogenous lithium aids in compensation of such deficiency, or that patients with bipolar disorder suffer from some congenital disorder of lithium metabolism, thus requiring higher daily lithium doses than healthy people. However, it was soon shown that this was not the case.Despite the emergence of a significant number of alternative mood stabilizers, lithium remains relevant in psychiatry to this day.

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