Price : $49.95
DOSTOEVSKY
The Scandal of Reason
Author : Maria Nemcova Banerjee
ISBN : 9781584200413
Publisher : Lindisfarne Press
Pages : 176
Format : Paperback
Description : "In a series of compelling, enlightening, and challenging essays Professor Banerjee looks at ‘Dostoevsky’s novelistic world as an intellectually coherent, spiritually integral whole.’ Her examination culminates in a brilliant attempt to provide a reasonable, rational, and verbal indictment of reason itself—comprehending and complementing the message of love and gestures of Dostoevsky’s positive heroes. Students and scholars of Russian and comparative literatures will find here a compelling case for Dostoevsky’s embrace of Christianity as his rebuttal to rationalist philosophy." —Thomas R. Beyer, Professor of Russian, Middlebury College
"Maria Banerjee provides an elegant, provocative reading of two of Dostoevsky’s masterworks, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov. Her theme is the harm that reason can do to the human soul if it is divorced from the higher spiritual powers within it. The separation of reason from the other human faculties is a fundamental theme of Russian religious philosophy. Thus her understanding of Dostoevsky’s worldview is formed by the philosophical commentaries of Solovyov, Ivanov, and Berdiaev. In passing, she gives us a panorama of Russian intellectual life of the nineteenth century, showing how Dostoevsky was influenced by and reacted against such figures as Belinsky, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, and Herzen. Banerjee has successfully accomplished what should be the final goal of such a work: to send us back to the masterworks themselves, which we will now reread with a deeper comprehension." —Boris Jakim
