The Possessed: Dostoevsky’s Conscientious Monarchy

In the mock apocalypse of The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky references biblical imagery to advocate for a conscientious monarchy as the ideal government to lead the Russian masses from deception. While Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin’s oppression of Stepan Trofimovich Verhovensky is similar to the Babylonian kings’ exploitation of the Jews in Daniel, the love between them and Dostoevsky’s eventual glorification of Stepan Trofimovich as the Russian prophet suggest the longevity of a conscientious monarchy, one in which the monarch takes responsibility for the welfare of its subjects and enforces Christian morality. Additionally, Dostoevsky’s description of the young anarchist revolutionaries, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky, echos imagery of the beast and harlot in Revelation. Through the parent-child relationship between the monarchists and revolutionaries, Dostoevsky argues that the revolutionaries take root in the traditional social hierarchy yet betray it. This paper analyzes how Dostoevsky uses the biblical parallelisms in The Possessed to foreshadow the end to nihilism and defend traditional morality and the tsar as Russia’s God-ordained ruler.

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Traditional Houses of the Paiwan in Taiwan

International Journal of Environment, Architecture, and Societies ◽

10.26418/ijeas.2021.1.02.73-82 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (02) ◽

pp. 73-82

Author(s):

Chang-Kou Tan

Keyword(s):

Social Process ◽

Point Of View ◽

Cultural Meanings ◽

Parent Child Relationship ◽

Child Relationship ◽

The Social ◽

The Family ◽

The One ◽

The Ideal ◽

Parent Child

The Paiwan, an Austronesian-speaking ethnic group, are one of sixteen Aborigines of Taiwan. This is an essay about the ethnography of traditional houses of the Paiwan. This is an essay about the ethnography of traditional houses of the Paiwan. I will describe structures, functions and construction process of traditional houses, and discuss briefly the social process and cultural meanings of houses. I have argued in an earlier paper that the Paiwan is a ‘house-based society’, in which social and cultural reproduction are bound up with the reproduction of houses. The goal of marriage is the mission of reproduction, and the ideal conjugal relationship is the one in which the couple share a common devotion to the reproduction of the house they created. In this paper I reconsider this point of view, and I propose that the parent-child relationship and the siblingship in the family are equally important. Because the traditional houses of the Paiwan are made of stone slabs, the process of making houses is quite long. In contrast, marriage may be short-lived and fragile. Even when the marriage relationship is terminated due to divorce, the process of building and maintaining a house will not stop, and this motivation could be maintained by the parent-child relationship and the siblingship.

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