Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia PDF Author: Irina Paperno
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the popular and scientific imagination, suicide has always been an enigmatic act that defies, and yet demands, explanation. Throughout the centuries, philosophers and writers, journalists and scientists have attempted to endow this act with meaning. In the nineteenth century, and especially in Russia, suicide became the focus for discussion of such issues as the immortality of the soul, free will and determinism, the physical and the spiritual, the individual and the social. Analyzing a variety of sources—medical reports, social treatises, legal codes, newspaper articles, fiction, private documents left by suicides—Irina Paperno describes the search for the meaning of suicide. Paperno focuses on Russia of the 1860s–1880s, when suicide was at the center of public attention.

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia PDF Author: Irina Paperno
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the popular and scientific imagination, suicide has always been an enigmatic act that defies, and yet demands, explanation. Throughout the centuries, philosophers and writers, journalists and scientists have attempted to endow this act with meaning. In the nineteenth century, and especially in Russia, suicide became the focus for discussion of such issues as the immortality of the soul, free will and determinism, the physical and the spiritual, the individual and the social. Analyzing a variety of sources—medical reports, social treatises, legal codes, newspaper articles, fiction, private documents left by suicides—Irina Paperno describes the search for the meaning of suicide. Paperno focuses on Russia of the 1860s–1880s, when suicide was at the center of public attention.

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia

Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia PDF Author: Irina Paperno
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801484254
Category : Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analyzing a variety of sources--medical reports, social treatises, legal codes, newspaper articles, fiction, private documents left by suicides--Irina Paperno describes the search for the meaning of suicide. Paperno focuses on Russia of the 1860s-1880s.

Dostoevsky the Thinker

Dostoevsky the Thinker PDF Author: James Patrick Scanlan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
For all his distance from philosophy, Dostoevsky was one of the most philosophical of writers. Drawing on his novels, essays, letters and notebooks, this volume examines Dostoevsky's philosophical thought.

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Susan K. Morrissey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139460811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a public act and a social phenomenon of exceptional scale, a disquieting emblem of Russia's encounter with modernity. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, from judicial records to the popular press, to examine the forms, meanings, and regulation of suicide from the seventeenth century to 1914, placing developments into a pan-European context. It argues against narratives of secularization that read the history of suicide as a trajectory from sin to insanity, crime to social problem, and instead focuses upon the cultural politics of self-destruction. Suicide - the act, the body, the socio-medical problem - became the site on which diverse authorities were established and contested, not just the priest or the doctor but also the sovereign, the public, and the individual. This panoramic history of modern Russia, told through the prism of suicide, rethinks the interaction between cultural forms, individual agency, and systems of governance.

The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia

The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Christine D. Worobec
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742537374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sweeping across more than two centuries, this compelling book introduces readers to some of the major themes in Imperial Russia. In a set of engaging essays, the contributors present richly human stories of individual and group experiences, as well as of key events in Russian history. We see the effects of reforms; the consequences of an economy and society built on serfdom; as well as the development of a civil society, the "woman question," urbanization, secularization, and modernity. As this book vividly shows, individuals, groups, and events raised out of obscurity remind us of the messiness of everyday life; of people's dreams, frustrations, and transformations; as well as of their sense of self and the community around them.

The Magic Mirror

The Magic Mirror PDF Author: Denise Jeanne Youngblood
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299162344
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Youngblood provides a cultural perspective of an era traditionally viewed through a revolutionary lens, exploring how films and the film industry illuminate and reflect the popular attitudes of a turbulent time.

Policing Prostitution

Policing Prostitution PDF Author: Siobhán Hearne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192574965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. This study examines how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted amid rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization around the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines the lives and challenges of different groups who engaged with the world of prostitution, including women who sold sex, the men who paid for it, mediators, the police, and wider urban communities. Drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Policing Prostitution illustrates how prostitution was an acknowledged, contested, and ever-present component of lower-class urban society in the late imperial period. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.

Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being

Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being PDF Author: Paul Fung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351569287
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
For Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), who lived with epileptic seizures for more than thirty years, illness is an ineradicable part of existence. Epilepsy in his writings denotes both a set of physical symptoms and a state of survival in which the protagonists incessantly try to articulate, theorize, or master what is ungraspable in their everyday experience. Their attempts to deal with what they cannot control or comprehend results in disappointment, or what Dostoevsky called a mystical terror. Dostoevsky's heroes are unable fully to understand this state, and their existence becomes 'epileptic' in so far as self-knowledge and self-coincidence are never achieved. Fung explores new critical pathways by reexamining five of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels. Drawing on insights from writers including Benjamin, Blanchot, Freud, Lacan and Nietzsche, the book takes epilepsy as a trope for discussing the unspeakable moments in the texts, and is intended for students and scholars who are interested in the subject of modernity, critique of the visual, and dialogues between philosophy and literature. Paul Fung is Assistant Professor in English at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong.

Culture and Cruelty in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud

Culture and Cruelty in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud PDF Author: Max Statkiewicz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793603936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Get Book Here

Book Description
Questioning the Enlightenment in Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Artaud challenges the cultural optimism of the Enlighten through an examination of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud. The Enlightenment was characterized, as Arnold put it, as “sweetness and light”. Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Artaud each pushed back against the optimism of the enlightenment through their writing and advanced the idea of cruelty as lying at the root of all human nature and culture. In this study, Statkiewicz explores the seemingly opposing notions of culture and cruelty within the works of these authors to discuss their complex relationship with one another.

Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture

Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture PDF Author: Lucy Frank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351150227
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma.