Człowiek podziemny w prozie konfesyjnej oraz wspomnieniowej Fiodora Dostojewskiego i Marii Komornickiej. Przypadek Notatek z podziemia i Biesów

This paper considers the idea of an underground man. It attempts to answer why writers reach for such a type of heroes and their position in the face of contemporary novel solutions. Maria Komornicka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky see in fallen individuals a source of creative inspiration. The confessional prose of these writers is an attempt to talk about the nihilist heroes who have chosen to live in a place of the metaphorical underground. The underground space becomes a construct of these works, and it is also a symbolic place where individuals desire chaos and darkness. The heroes of Demons and Notes from the Underground escape from where “everyone” lives and go underground, devoting themselves to underground mysticism because only such space protects them against the total collapse of the universe. Underground imagery governs the research process and shows how it determines the structure of a work and influences the methodology and ways of reading these works

Wiedza i światło u Jana Amosa Komeńskiego w "Labiryncie świata i raju serca" i w twórczości Fiodora Dostojewskiego – podobieństwa i różnice

In the works by John Amos Comenius (1592-1670), light often plays a key role in the interpretation of the text. This is related to the philosophy of the Baroque, according to which a person wanders through the metaphorical labyrinth of life and only later, passing through the darkness, can reach the truth. Light in Comenius' works is particularly important for cognition, to which John Amos Comenius devoted a large part of his work, both artistic and pedagogical. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) in his reflections on the nature of man and God also refers to the biblical interpretation according to which light is closely related to the presence of Christ. Man is faced with a choice between the light and the dark, he is lost in the choice, as if in a baroque world-maze and darkness.

Unde malum? Czesław Miłosz on Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Solovyov

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz’s essays on Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and A Tale of the Anti-Christ by Vladimir Solovyov. These essays focus on the essence, genesis, and forms of evil, and seek an answer to the unde malum question. Miłosz believes that in world literature there are no other works that show the nature of evil in a similar way. Dostoyevsky’s work, when read from various philosophical perspectives, reveals very complex meanings, as Solovyov demonstrates. Through his engagement with the two great Russian writers, Miłosz’s own work resonates more strongly in the debate about the condition of the modern man.

Alexey Slapovsky vs Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or Life Without Being

The article examines the dialogue in A. Slapovsky’s works of the late 1990s–2000s with F. Dostoevsky. The article highlights forms and functions of this dialogue: the mention of the writer's name, the reinterpretation of his works perform the function of an ironic, often parodic, reflection on the changed status of the author, the nature of the readership, the perception of literature during a crisis of literary centrism; the value deformations occurring in society are emphasized with the help of a literary prism. “Dostoevsky's context” reflects the writer's reflection on his own work and allows us to judge the direction of Slapovsky's creative evolution.

Dostoyevsky and the Defense of Compassion

Is cruelty a problem for politics? For Hannah Arendt, the answer was no. On her view, a compassionate response towards persons suffering cruelty is best avoided because compassion can only become political by transforming incommunicable individual pain into abstract suffering. At crucial moments in her argument in On Revolution, she cites the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky as an ally. However, I argue that Arendt misrepresents Dostoyevsky. Through a critical examination of his mature novels, I show how suffering is communicable and compassion is political for Dostoyevsky. By attending to this theme in his writings, I argue that Dostoyevsky sheds light on the problem of cruelty in a way that Arendt’s framework cannot. This suggests that he is more at home with theorists like Judith Shklar who “put cruelty first” than with Arendt, although in favoring compassion I argue that he departs from Shklar’s liberalism of fear and offers a more constructive, hopeful political vision.

War is (not) Our Home. Andrei Konchalovsky’s House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) as a Russian Literary and Cultural Archive

The article focuses on the film House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) of Andrei Konchalovsky, who is one of the most recognized contemporary Russian directors. The selected work is analyzed from the point of view of its intertextual relationships with Russian literary texts and cultural phenomena. The motif of the train, the paradigm of jurodivyj and the reference to the artistic worlds of acclaimed Russian writers (Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Vyrypaev) are among the main parallels which are discussed in the publication. The eclectic nature of the film allows treating it as a cultural archive founded on the storage capacity of the cultural memory. In the context of war, the sphere of art and the imagined can be seen as the most stable reality.

Językowy obraz miłości w ujęciu translatorycznym (na podstawie „Zbrodni i kary” Fiodora Dostojewskiego)

Emotions and feelings, which determine mental experiences and activities of individuals, find their reflection in literary works. Love manifests itself externally as a behaviour of an individual, including the language he or she uses to communicate. The article constitutes an attempt to present the linguistic image of the world embodied in a Polish translation from Russian. For that purpose the research material was excerpted from Crime and Punishment, a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Boris de Schloezer: A translator’s paradox

Russian born Boris de Schloezer (1881–1969) is mainly known as one of the first translators-cum-philosophers who contributed to spreading Leo Shestov’s ideas and to introducing the European audience to some of new musical forms invented by the Russian émigré composers and musicians. Schloezer is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest translators of Russian literature into French in the 20th c. He proposed his own way of translating Russian classics and among the authors he translated are Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but also the philosopher Leo Shestov. In the foreword ‘En marge d’une traduction’ to his 1960 translation of War and Peace [ Voyna i mir ] Schloezer explicated his principles of literary translation and author’s language. This text was not only a major landmark of his career as a translator but his final achievement in this matter. More than twenty years later this text was reedited in Paris in a special issue with different texts written by Schloezer and other majors French authors about Schloezer’s works. This publication makes this text accessible to the Russian readers for the very first time.

The Devil Is in the Details: Neurological Diseases Presenting as Religious Hallucinations in Two Literary Works

Few authors in the Western literature have acquired such a monumental reputation as Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; although with different backgrounds and aesthetic peculiarities, their writings converge thematically in their frequent relationship with disease. From Dostoyevsky’s struggle with epilepsy to Mann’s descriptions of tuberculosis and cholera, many are the examples found in their body of work describing medical afflictions. One noteworthy similarity in their works is the presence of hallucinations with Mephistopheles-like devilish entities, possibly caused by neurological diseases: in Mann’s case, concerning the main character of Doctor Faustus, caused by neurosyphilis, while for Dostoyevsky, concerning one of the titular Brothers Karamazov, by delirium tremens. In both cases, the authors leave room for ambiguity, with the characters themselves casting doubts on whether their experiences were indeed caused by their disease or by an actual supernatural being. In this, we may find an interesting intersection between neurology and the literature.

“A Gentle Creature” by Fyodor Dostoevsky and “The Barrier” by Pavel Vezhinov: Systematic and Comparative Reading

The article attempts to identify systemic intertextual connections between novellas “The Barrier” by Pavel Vezhinov and “A Gentle Creature” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (as well as individual intertextual connections between “The Barrier” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”) and show how their explication contributes to the comprehension of the artistic concept of each of the works. The methodological basis of the study is the interpretation of intertextuality as a product of reading (not as a phenomenon of “writing”), according to which Vezhinov and Dostoevsky – writers belonging to different national cultures and historical eras – in some sense become contemporaries. Accordingly, “A Gentle Creature”, written earlier, is enriched in meaning as a result of its comparison with “The Barrier”, as well as the latter by comparison with the story of Dostoevsky. The basis for comparing the stories is the similarity at the level of the storylines, the narrative type, the system of the characters. At the same time, the ways of transforming the storyline into a plot, such as: external composition, focalisation, organization of modal-temporal and spatial plans, are deeply different. The spatial organization of the works plays a particularly important role in this sense, since the storyline of both stories is based on one type of rite de passage – the transition from life “to another life”. This article is devoted to the question of whether this transition took place and whether, as a result, the spiritual transformation of the main characters took place.