Please join the Department of English for a lecture by Dr. Caryl Emerson: "Dostoevsky Between Theory and Practice, Fantasy and Terror".
This talk is co-sponsored by DSEELC Forum of Slavic Literature and Culture, the Department of Comparative Studies, the Department of English and the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
World-class writers date in different ways, and to different depths. Dostoevsky’s bicentennial gives us the chance to ponder his continuing extraordinary influence. Did he “predict” our current 21st-century catastrophes, or is he simply such a fabulous thinker and storyteller that we now perceive our catastrophes in Dostoevskian terms? If “applied Tolstoy” gives rise to Gandhi and Martin Luther King—spiritually luminous messengers—then “applied Dostoevsky” has always been darker, less idealistic, less ecumenical, indeed, perhaps even demonic. And yet Dostoevsky is far and away the funnier, more flexible writer, with a comic genius that seems stitched in to his tragic scenarios. The intent of this talk is to illustrate how a rising generation of Dostoevsky scholars is pushing back against some of Bakhtin’s now canonical judgments about this great writer. It will also pay tribute to two recently departed colleagues, Professors Nina Perlina and Robert Bird, who contributed profoundly to our understanding of Dostoevsky’s quest.
Dr. Caryl Emerson is a Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevskii), Mikhail Bakhtin, and Russian music, opera and theater. Recent projects include the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii (1887-1950), the allegorical-historical novelist Vladimir Sharov (1952-2018), and the co-editing, with George Pattison and Randall A. Poole, of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought.
