Week 1: Why Do We Still Read Dostoyevsky?
This opening lecture will offer a wide-ranging overview of the writer’s life and historical contexts, his literary work, and system of beliefs, and will tackle the question of his continuing interest for readers today.
Week 2: Dostoyevsky as a Religious Philosopher
We will explore Dostoyevsky’s religious postions, his relationship to Nietzschean thought, and the crisis of Christianity in Europe in the mid- and late 19th century. We will also explore the theme of East versus West embodied in some of his writings.
Week 3: Notes from the Underground
This week’s session will focus on the most unpleasant anti-hero in all of Russian literature and on Dostoyevsky’s lashing out against Utopias.
Week 4: The Big Novels and their Main Ideas
This lecture will survey Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, andThe Idiot. We will consider such topics as drama and the grotesque, the world of religious visionaries and revolutionary nihilists, of kind-hearted prostitutes and hysterical femmes fatales.
Week 5: The Possessed: The Writer’s Prophetic Vision
This lecture will cover the historical background to the novel and explore its real-life prototypes. We will also engage in a close textual analysis of the narrative.
Week 6: The Possessed (continued)
This final lecture will continue the textual analysis begun in the previous class. We close with a exploration of Dostoyevsky’s influence on modern literature and thought.
