Dostoyevsky
Story Stream
Liminal Urbanism December 29, 2023
Legend has it that in 1703, during the early stages of the Great Northern War, when Russian troops captured the Swedish fortress of Nyen along the River Neva, Peter the Great leaped from his horse, slashed the muddy ground with his saber, and exclaim...
Russian Literature's Prophetic Voice July 03, 2023
Looking back on his early twenties, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “many, many of the young people of the day seemed to be filled with a spirit of some sort and seemed to be awaiting something.” It was 1845. No one quite knew what to wait for. But sure...
Russian Assets June 12, 2023
Russia, that half-barbarous country, whose leaders, be they czars or commissars, Rasputins or Putins, have always treated their own people as if they were a conquered nation, this same Russia, in the course of little more than a century brought forth...
Woke Despotism, Dostoevsky, and the Nihilism of Cancel Culture September 09, 2020
The latest installment in an ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein. Daniel J. Mahoney joins Mark to discuss woke despotism, Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” and why nihilism—not moralism—is behind today’s cancel culture....
Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia June 06, 2020
The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. The differences between the two events, howeve...
The Scholar Starting Brawls with the Enlightenment May 29, 2020
Who could resist the title? László F. Földényi’s new book of essays is called “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears” (Yale). It sounds like something that might happen in a Dostoyevsky novel: cause and effect scrambled, reason abo...
Prophets for Our Age of Suicide June 03, 2019
To read or not to read literary criticism, that is the question for the twenty-first century reader who prefers to process 42 characters instead of 42 minutes of reading a substantial argument. I draw the either-or dilemma from Hamlet's famous speech...
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Dostoyevsky April 02, 2019
HIS NAME WAS DANIEL, he told me, eventually. He'd found me stumbling down the highway near the Hungarian-Croatian border on a sweltering day. I still had a vague hope of getting to Budapest, but by that point I'd given up trying to catch a ride and w...
