Dostoyevsky’s characters frequently suffer from something he calls “brain fever.” Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, Raskolnikov’s clueless mother, has it in Crime and Punishment; in fact she dies from it. Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky has it, for a while, in The Adolescent. So does Nicolas Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, in The Possessed. Then there is Rogojin, in The Idiot; not […]
Dostoyevsky
The Incidence of “Brain Fever” in The Brothers Karamazov
November 13th, 2006 · 3 Comments
Why Did Jesus Kiss the Grand Inquisitor?
November 1st, 2006 · 6 Comments
In his recent lectures on Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Hubert Dreyfus asks this question of his audience, primarily comprising lower-division students at U.C. Berkeley. Through the electronic magic of pod-casting, I surreptitiously have been listening to Professor Dreyfus for the last six months or so, as I drive to and from the studio. My dog, […]
2006, copyright