A review of the life and works of the great Fyodor Dostoevsky following René Girard's book Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground. A masterpiece of literary criticism in its own right, this book brings edifying and brilliant insights into Dostoevsky's own masterpieces, but only by connecting them to the novelist's lesser works and personal life.
Girard traces a coherent arch in Dostoevsky's life and works, from a frustrated naive romantic trying to fit into the literary fads of the age while coping with his personal inadequacies to a man who experiences a spiritual breakthrough and perceives the unflattering, diabolical truths about the motives that drive him. These motives have everything to do with Girard's mimetic theories on desire and on modernity, theories that came to him while reading Dostoevsky, among other novelists, as a young academic.
We begin to see how Dostoevsky's and Girard's works are coupled and how they provide such a powerful, prophetic interpretation of modernity.
Part 2 will be covered in the next episode, which traces the arch from Dostoevsky awakening in the underground, to struggling to escape it, and finally to the spectacular resurrection out of it.
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