《Dostoevsky-Frank, Joseph》《陀思妥耶夫斯基·弗兰克、约瑟夫》 -pdf、txt、mobi、kindle、epub电子版下载

Parched with the spirit’s thirst, I crossed

An endless desert sunk in gloom,

And a six-winged seraph came

Where the tracks met and I stood lost.

Fingers light as dream he laid

Upon my lids; I opened wide

My eagle eyes, and gazed around.

He laid his fingers on my ears

And they were filled with roaring sound:

I heard the music of the spheres,

The flight of angels through the skies,

The beasts that crept beneath the sea,

The heady uprush of the vine;

And, like a lover kissing me,

He rooted out this tongue of mine

Fluent in lies and vanity;

He tore my fainting lips apart

And, with his right hand steeped in blood,

He armed me with a serpent’s dart;

With his bright sword he split my breast;

My heart leapt to him with a bound;

A glowing livid coal he pressed

Into the hollow of the wound.

There in the desert I lay dead.

And God called out to me and said:

“Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,

And let my words be seen and heard

By all who turn aside from me.

And burn them with my fiery word.”

—A. S. Pushkin, “The Prophet”

trans. D. M. Thomas

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Preface: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Acknowledgments

Transliteration

Abbreviations

PART I

The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849

1 Prelude

2 The Family

3 The Religious and Cultural Background

4 The Academy of Military Engineers

5 The Two Romanticisms

6 The Gogol Period

7 Poor Folk

8 Dostoevsky and the Pléiade

9 Belinsky and Dostoevsky: I

10 Feuilletons and Experiments

11 Belinsky and Dostoevsky: II

12 The Beketov and Petrashevsky Circles

13 Dostoevsky and Speshnev

PART II

The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859

14 The Peter-and-Paul Fortress

15 Katorga

16 “Monsters in Their Misery”

17 Private Dostoevsky

18 A Russian Heart

19 The Siberian Novellas

20 Homecoming

PART III

The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865

21 Into the Fray

22 An Aesthetics of Transcendence

23 The Insulted and Injured

24 The Era of Proclamations

25 Portrait of a Nihilist

26 Time: The Final Months

27 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

28 An Emancipated Woman, A Tormented Lover

29 The Prison of Utopia

30 Notes from Underground

31 The End of Epoch

PART IV

The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871

32 Khlestakov in Wiesbaden

33 From Novella to Novel

34 Crime and Punishment

35 “A Little Diamond”

36 The Gambler

37 Escape and Exile

38 In Search of a Novel

39 An Inconsolable Father

40 The Idiot

41 The Pamphlet and the Poem

42 Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin

43 Exile’s Return

44 History and Myth in Demons

45 The Book of the Impostors

PART V

The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881

46 The Citizen

47 Narodnichestvo: Russian Populism

48 Bad Ems

49 A Raw Youth

50 A Public Figure

51 The Diary of a Writer, 1876–1877

52 A New Novel

53 The Great Debate

54 Rebellion and the Grand Inquisitor

55 Terror and Martial Law

56 The Pushkin Festival

57 Controversies and Conclusions

58 The Brothers Karamazov: Books 1–4

59 The Brothers Karamazov: Books 5–6

60 The Brothers Karamazov: Books 7–12

61 Death and Transfiguration

Editor’s Note

Index

PREFACE

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Since the present volume is a condensation of the five that I have already published on the life and works of Dostoevsky, I should like to acquaint my new readers with the point of view from which they were written. My approach arose primarily from a troubling sense that important aspects of Dostoevsky’s work had been overlooked, or at least not accorded sufficient importance, in the considerable secondary literature devoted to his career. The major perspective of these studies derived from his personal history, and this had been so spectacular that it was almost irresistible for biographers to recount its peripeties at length. No other Russian writer of his stature could equal the range of his familiarity with both the depths and heights of Russian society—a range that included four years spent as a convict living side by side with peasant criminals, and then, at the end of his life, invitations to dine with younger members of the family of Tsar Alexander II, who, it was believed, might benefit from his conversation. It is quite understandable that such a life, in all its fascinating particularities, should have furnished the background against which Dostoevsky’s works were initially viewed and interpreted.

The more I read Dostoevsky’s novels and stories, however, not to mention his journalism, both literary and political (his Diary of a Writer was the most widely circulated monthly publication ever published in Russia), the more it seemed to me that a conventional biographical point of view could not do justice to the complexities of his creations. To be sure, while Dostoevsky’s characters struggle with the psychological and sentimental problems that provide the substance of all novels, more important, his books are also inspired by the ideological doctrines of his time. Such doctrines, particularly in his major works, furnish the chief motivations for the often bizarre, eccentric, and occasionally murderous behavior of characters like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or both Stavrogin and Kirillov in Demons. The personal entanglements of the figures in the novels, though depicted with often melodramatic intensity, cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations.

It thus seemed to me, when I set out to write my own work on Dostoevsky, that its perspective should be shifted, and that the purely personal biography should no longer dominate the explanatory context in which he was creating. Much less space is thus given in my books to the details of Dostoevsky’s private life and much more to the clash of various ideas prevailing during the period in which he lived. The most perceptive reader of my first four volumes, the much lamented and gifted novelist and critic David Foster Wallace, remarked that “Ellman’s James Joyce, pretty much the standard by which most literary bios are measured, doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory.” This is not to say that I ignore Dostoevsky’s private life, but it remains linked to other aspects of his era that provide it with a much larger significance. Indeed, one way of defining Dostoevsky’s originality is to see in it this ability to integrate the personal with the major social-political and cultural issues of his day.

The above remarks about the shortcomings of the critical literature on Dostoevsky apply primarily to books in the various languages other than his own (mainly English, French, and German). It certainly cannot be said that the ideological and philosophical background of Dostoevsky’s creations has not been explored in Russian scholarship and criticism. Indeed, my own analysis of this background is greatly indebted to several generations of Russian scholars and critics such as Dimitry Merezkhovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Leonid Grossman, as well as to philosophers such as Lev Shestov and Nikolay Berdyaev. But as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, it became difficult for Russian scholars, up until very recently, to build on these initiators and to continue to study Dostoevsky impartially and objectively. His greatest works, after all, had been efforts to undermine the ideological foundations out of which that revolution had sprung, and it was thus necessary to highlight his deficiencies rather than his achievements. As for émigré scholars, with very few exceptions their works dwelt on the moral-philosophical implications of Dostoevsky’s ideas rather than on the texts themselves. While utilizing all this interpretative effort with gratitude, I have tried to rectify what seemed to me its limitations, whether caused by ideological restrictions or by nonliterary concerns.

Placing Dostoevsky’s writings in their social-political and ideological context, however, is only the first step toward an adequate comprehension of his works. For what is important about them is not that his characters engage in theoretical disputations. It is, rather, that their ideas become part of their personalities, to such an extent, indeed, that neither exists independently of the other. His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical. He possessed what I call an “eschatological imagination,” one that could envision putting ideas into action and then following them out to their ultimate consequences. At the same time, his characters respond to such consequences according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu, and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky’s novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding in social life.

Dostoevsky’s innate propensity to dramatize ideas in this way was noted in an extremely acute remark by one of his closest associates, the philosopher Nikolay Strakhov. “The most routine abstract thought,” he wrote, “very often struck him with an uncommon force and would stir him up remarkably. He was, in any case, a person in the highest degree excitable and impressionable. A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness. Then he would state it in various forms, sometimes giving it a very sharp, graphic expression, although not explaining it logically or developing its content” (3: 42). It is this inborn tendency of Dostoevsky to “feel thought” that gives his best work its special stamp, and why it is so important to locate his writings in relation to the evolution of ideas in his lifetime.