Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac

Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac PDF Author: Julia Titus
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644697815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
The focus of this study in comparative criticism is close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication—his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834)—and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading, the author analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, this book focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation of Eugénie Grandet predicts the creation of his own literary characters, themes, and other aspects of his literary output that are now recognized as Dostoevsky’s signature style. It investigates the changes that Dostoevsky made while working on Balzac’s text and analyzes the complex transplantation of Balzac’s imagery, motifs, and character portraiture from Eugénie Grandet into Dostoevsky’s own writing later on.

Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac

Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac PDF Author: Julia Titus
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644697815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Get Book Here

Book Description
The focus of this study in comparative criticism is close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication—his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834)—and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading, the author analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, this book focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation of Eugénie Grandet predicts the creation of his own literary characters, themes, and other aspects of his literary output that are now recognized as Dostoevsky’s signature style. It investigates the changes that Dostoevsky made while working on Balzac’s text and analyzes the complex transplantation of Balzac’s imagery, motifs, and character portraiture from Eugénie Grandet into Dostoevsky’s own writing later on.

Selling the Story

Selling the Story PDF Author: Jonathan Paine
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers. An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diary of its author’s struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. The Brothers Karamazov transforms into a story of Dostoevsky’s sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola’s Money documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola’s own big business, his factory of novels. Combining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value.

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism PDF Author: Donald Fanger
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810115934
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.

Dostoevsky by Zweig

Dostoevsky by Zweig PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
This is the third essay of Stefan Zweig’s Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, written in the early 20th century. Part biography, part literary criticism, part cultural history, the essay offers a window onto how a Central European regarded the Russian master, who died in 1881, the year Zweig was born. Dostoevsky’s genius, in Zweig’s view, owed a debt to his illness, as Tolstoy’s did to his radiant health. Illness “enabled Dostoevsky to soar upward into a sphere of such concentrated feeling as is rarely experienced by normal men; it permitted him to penetrate into the underworld of the emotions, into the submerged regions of the psyche.” This essay is one of the best examples of Zweig’s psychologically-informed literary criticism.

Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky

Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”

Poetry Reader for Russian Learners

Poetry Reader for Russian Learners PDF Author: Julia Titus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300184824
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Through the poetry of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian authors, including Pushkin and Akhmatova, Poetry Reader for Russian Learners helps upper-beginner, intermediate, and advanced Russian students refine their language skills. Poems are coded by level of difficulty. The text facilitates students' interaction with authentic texts, assisted by a complete set of learning tools, including biographical sketches of each poet, stress marks, annotations, exercises, questions for discussion, and a glossary. An ancillary Web site contains audio files for all poems.

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac PDF Author: Owen Heathcote
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316867382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
One of the founders of literary realism and the serial novel, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a prolific writer who produced more than a hundred novels, plays and short stories during his career. With its dramatic plots and memorable characters, Balzac's fiction has enthralled generations of readers. 'La Comédie humaine', the vast collection of works in which he strove to document every aspect of nineteenth-century French society, has influenced writers from Flaubert, Zola and Proust to Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. This Companion provides a critical reappraisal of Balzac, combining studies of his major novels with guidance on the key narrative and thematic features of his writing. Twelve chapters by world-leading specialists encompass a wide spectrum of topics such as the representation of history, philosophy and religion, the plight of the struggling artist, gender and sexuality, and Balzac's depiction of the creative process itself.

Through the Russian Prism

Through the Russian Prism PDF Author: Joseph Frank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691014562
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Essays probe the culture that spawned the great novels of Dostoevsky and explore the author's influence on world literature.

Russia's Capitalist Realism

Russia's Capitalist Realism PDF Author: Vadim Shneyder
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‐century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.

The Magic Skin

The Magic Skin PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781727357745
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The Magic Skin (La Peau de chagrin) is set in early 19th-century Paris and tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy. Although the novel uses fantastic elements, its main focus is a realistic portrayal of the excesses of bourgeois materialism. Balzac's renowned attention to detail is used to describe a gambling house, an antique shop, a royal banquet, and other locales. He also includes details from his own life as a struggling writer, placing the main character in a home similar to the one he occupied at the start of his literary career. The central theme of La Peau de chagrin is the conflict between desire and longevity. The magic skin represents the owner's life-force, which is depleted through every expression of will, especially when it is employed for the acquisition of power. Ignoring a caution from the shopkeeper who offers him the skin, the protagonist greedily surrounds himself with wealth, only to find himself miserable and decrepit at the story's end. (source: Wikipedia)