Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

by Donna Tussing Orwin, Anna Grodetskaya (Translator)

Overview

The path to modernity was late in Russia, and as the country, absorbing western thought and art at a gallop, hurried to catch up in the nineteenth century, it produced cultural content about the modern individual unmatched in any other society. While in the process of creating Russian psychological prose in its mature form, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy converse through their texts. Behind the scenes, they criticize each other, but also grow their own prose in response to each other. Through close readings and other means, this book lays bare conversations about childhood, evil, and other themes. All three writers explore how self-examination changes us and has negative as well as positive effects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644698044
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Russian

About the Author

Donna Tussing Orwin teaches at the University of Toronto and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A specialist on Russian psychological prose, and editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal, 1997-2005, she received the Pushkin Medal in 2008 for her contribution "to the study and popularisation of Russian language and culture."

Editorial Reviews

"The great Russian Realists were also great lay psychologists. In a century bewitched by norms and the pursuit of scientific truths, they set out to defend the absolute reality of each person's subjectivity. Orwin's wonderful study helps us to see, once again, how subtle are the narrative techniques that transmit ordinary irreducible life and why the quest to legitimize individualized experience results paradoxically in a Russian novel where each reader (from a vast variety of eras, cultures, languages) feels uniquely 'at home.'" —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

"Consequences of Consciousness offers a particularly rich sense of the interactions among these three writers (and some others, like Herzen) as, in overt and implicit reference to each other, they debated and redebated ethics, meaning, and selfhood...I hope I do not exaggerate, but it seems to me that Orwin has put her finger on the pulse of Russian realism and reminded us why it matters." —Russian Review

"Consequences of Consciousness is an estimable scholarly endeavor, expertly researched, frequently thought-provoking, and blessedly free of jargon. Shedding new light and revealing light on the interrelationships among the three literary giants of nineteenth-century Russia, it will make its readers far more conscious of the workings of consciousness in both Russian and western literature." —Slavic Review

"Orwin's study is that rare book from which many different readers may derive benefit: it is philosophically agile, filled with exacting and illuminating readings of important texts, and engagingly written—all in the service of a cursed, undying question about what it means for us to live as creatures condemned to know they live only to die." —Slavic and East European Journal

From the Publisher

"The great Russian Realists were also great lay psychologists. In a century bewitched by norms and the pursuit of scientific truths, they set out to defend the absolute reality of each person's subjectivity. Orwin's wonderful study helps us to see, once again, how subtle are the narrative techniques that transmit ordinary irreducible life and why the quest to legitimize individualized experience results paradoxically in a Russian novel where each reader (from a vast variety of eras, cultures, languages) feels uniquely 'at home.'"

Princeton University - Caryl Emerson

"Consequences of Consciousness is an estimable scholarly endeavor, expertly researched, frequently thought-provoking, and blessedly free of jargon. Shedding new light and revealing light on the interrelationships among the three literary giants of nineteenth-century Russia, it will make its readers far more conscious of the workings of consciousness in both Russian and western literature."

Slavic Review

"Consequences of Consciousness offers a particularly rich sense of the interactions among these three writers (and some others, like Herzen) as, in overt and implicit reference to each other, they debated and redebated ethics, meaning, and selfhood...I hope I do not exaggerate, but it seems to me that Orwin has put her finger on the pulse of Russian realism and reminded us why it matters."

Russian Review

"Orwin's study is that rare book from which many different readers may derive benefit: it is philosophically agile, filled with exacting and illuminating readings of important texts, and engagingly written—all in the service of a cursed, undying question about what it means for us to live as creatures condemned to know they live only to die."

Slavic and East European Journal