Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Demons" (Besy, in Russian, variously translated as "The Possessed" and "Devils") is a fundamentally political and social novel. It draws directly on the true story of a murder committed in 1869 by Russian anarchist and...

Fyodor Dostoevsky published his novel The Devils from 1871 to 1872 in installments in the joural The Messengerat a time when there was political unrest in Russia, although not yet enough for a real revolution. Inspiration for the novel came from...

Archetypes are an important foundation for building literary work. As “reoccurring patterns, images, or descriptive details” (Crisp 2), they not only define the identity of an author’s characters, but the course of the plot, the journeys and the...

Among many of the themes in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, one of the most prominent is the theme of suffering. Arguably, suffering is one of the largest themes within all of Dostoevsky’s works, particularly because of the difficulty and hardship...

Disability and deformity is a very interesting topic to have come out of the Romantic period. It challenged stereotypes and what the public saw as crippling. The literature written by disabled writers or that feature disabled writers made...

Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot deals with the theme of self-discovery through the vessels of love, loss, and language. The Idiot follows Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, through her freshman year at Harvard in 1995; the reader...

Archetypes are an important foundation for building literary work. As “reoccurring patterns, images, or descriptive details” (Crisp 2), they not only define the identity of an author’s characters, but the course of the plot, the journeys and the...

The Flowers of Evil (1866) authored by Charles Baudelaire and The Gambler (1867) by Fyodor Dostoevsky are two literary works of art with common denominators: they both deal with the themes of gambling, love, luck, moral debasement, and deep...

The Grand Inquisitor

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

- John Milton

The questions proposed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor challenge the very essence of human existence. The idea of...

When Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus [1], he demonstrated the absurdity of human existence in the indifferent universe with the ridiculous task of pushing a rock up a hill an infinite number of times. Every time Sisyphus pushed the rock to...

In the unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova, Fyodor Dostoevsky portrays Alexandra’s letter from her former lover S.O. as a parallel for little Netochka and Katya’s relationship/friendship. It is perhaps nclear what a 19th century Russian author...

“The Peasant Marey”, although written fifteen years after the publication of The House of the Dead, is a short story developed by Fyodor Dostoevsky from the same autobiographical experience: his imprisonment in Siberia. The story has an unnamed...

In his short story Bobok, Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a perfect example of one of his favorite devices, magical realism, which paints a realist view of the modern world with the addition of magical elements. The idea that a man might lie down in a...

In his article “Literature,” David M. Bethea explains how “the pagan concept of “mother Earth” and the Christian concept of “Holy Russia” … were telescoped again, made extension of each other. As a result, perhaps the greatest of all modern...