Psychology Paper     LOOK WHAT I MADE!!!!

 

 

Describe the influence this novel had on the developent of psychological theory in the late 19th and 20th Centuries. 

 

Possible thesis statements 

 

Through dostoevsky's novel crime and punishment, psychological theories were introduced and began to be skepticized

 

Dostoevsky influenced modern psychological theories in "Crime and Punishment" through his in-depth look into the mind of a criminal.

 

 

 

 

Hayley

 http://www.fyodordostoevsky.com/essays.php

there is an article called "Dostoevsky and Psychology" 2/3 down the page, pretty snazzy article!

 

 

http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/dostoevskybio.html#thelandlady

 

INTRO:   Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest writers in world literature. Best-known for his novels Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment) and Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov), he attained profound philosophical and psychological insights which anticipated important developments in twentieth-century thought, including psychoanalysis and existentialism. In addition, Dostoyevsky's powerful literary depictions of the human condition exerted a profound influence on modern writers, such as Franz Kafka, whose works further develop some of the Russian novelist's themes. The writer's own troubled life enabled him to portray with deep sympathy characters who are emotionally and spiritually downtrodden and who in many cases epitomize the traditional Christian conflict between the body and the spirit.

 

 

Khozyayka (1847; The Landlady) as devoid of a social message.

 

In 1848 Dostoyevsky joined a group of young intellectuals, led by Mikhail Petrashevsky, which met to discuss literary and political issues. In the reactionary political climate of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, such groups were illegal, and in 1849 the members of the so-called Petrashevsky Circle were arrested and charged with subversion. Dostoyevsky and several of his associates were imprisoned and sentenced to death. As they were facing the firing squad, an imperial messenger arrived with the announcement that the Czar had commuted the death sentences to hard labor in Siberia. This scene was to haunt the novelist the rest of his life. Dostoyevsky described his life as a prisoner in Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1862; The House of the Dead), a novel demonstrating both an insight into the criminal mind and an understanding of the Russian lower classes. While in prison the writer underwent a profound spiritual and philosophical transformation. His intense study of the New Testament, the only book the prisoners were allowed to read, contributed to his rejection of his earlier liberal political views and led him to the conviction that redemption is possible only through suffering and faith, a belief which informed his later work.

 

Dostoyevsky was released from the prison camp in 1854; however, he was forced to serve as a soldier in a Siberian garrison for an additional five years. When Dostoyevsky was finally allowed to return to St. Petersburg in 1859, he eagerly resumed his literary career, founding two periodicals and writings articles and short fiction. The articles expressed his new-found belief in a social and political order based on the spiritual values of the Russian people. These years were marked by further personal and professional misfortunes, including the forced closing of his journals by the authorities, the deaths of his wife and his brother, and a financially devastating addiction to gambling. It was in this atmosphere that Dostoyevsky wrote Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground) and Crime and Punishment. In Notes from the Underground Dostoyevsky satirizes contemporary social and political views by presenting a narrator whose notes reveal that his purportedly progressive beliefs lead only to sterility and inaction. Dostoyevsky's portrayal of this bitter and frustrated Underground Man is hailed as the introduction of an important new type of literary figure. Crime and Punishment brought him acclaim but scant financial compensation. Viewed by critics as one of his masterpieces, Crime and Punishment is the novel in which Dostoyevsky first develops the theme of redemption through suffering. The protagonist Raskolnikovwhose name derives from the Russian word for schism or splitis presented as the embodiment of spiritual nihilism. The novel depicts the harrowing confrontation between his philosophical beliefs, which prompt him to commit a murder in an attempt to prove his supposed superiority, and his inherent morality, which condemns his actions.

 

In 1867, Dostoyevsky fled to Europe with his second wife to escape creditors. Although they were distressing due to financial and personal difficulties, Dostoyevsky's years abroad were fruitful, for he completed one important novel and began another. Idiot (1869; The Idiot), influenced by Hans Holbein's painting Christ Taken from the Cross and by Dostoyevsky's opposition to the growing atheistic sentiment of the times, depicts the Christ-like protagonist's loss of innocence and his experience of sin. Dostoyevsky's profound conservatism, which marked his political thinking following his Siberian experience, and especially his reaction against revolutionary socialism, provided the impetus for his great political novel Besy (1871-72; The Possessed). Based on a true event, in which a young revolutionary was murdered by his comrades, this novel provoked a storm of controversy for its harsh depiction of ruthless radicals. In his striking portrayal of Stavrogin, the novel's central character, Dostoyevsky described a man dominated by the life-denying forces of nihilism.

 

Dostoyevsky returned to Russia in 1871 and began his final decade of prodigious literary activity. In sympathy with the conservative political party, he accepted the editorship of a reactionary weekly, Grazhdanin (The Citizen). In his Dnevnik pisatelya (1873-1877; The Diary of a Writer), initially a column in the Citizen but later an independent periodical, Dostoyevsky published a variety of prose works, including some of his outstanding short stories. Dostoyevski's last work was Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov), a family tragedy of epic proportions, which is viewed as one of the great novels of world literature. The novel recounts the murder of a father by one of his four sons. Initially, his son Dmitri is arrested for the crime, but as the story unfolds it is revealed that the illegitimate son Smerdyakov has killed the old man at what he believes to be the instigation of his half-brother Ivan. Ivan's philosophical essay, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, is a work now famous in its own right. Presented as a debate in which the Inquisitor condemns Christ for promoting the belief that mankind has the freedom of choice between good and evil, the piece explores the conflict between intellect and faith, and between the forces of evil and the redemptive power of Christianity. Dostoyevsky envisioned this novel as the first of a series of works depicting The Life of a Great Sinner, but early in 1881, a few months after completing The Brothers Karamazov, the writer died at his home in St. Petersburg.

 

To his contemporary readers, Dostoyevsky appeared as a writer primarily interested in the terrible aspects of human existence. However, later critics have recognized that the novelist sought to plumb the depths of the psyche, in order to reveal the full range of the human experience, from the basest desires to the most elevated spiritual yearnings. Above all, he illustrated the universal human struggle to understand God and self. Dostoyevsky was, Katherine Mansfield wrote, a being who loved, in spite of everything, adored life, even while he knew the dank, dark places.

 

 

SARA'S FINDINGS FROM THAT ONE BOOK

 

-         Razumihin says that the socialists hoped to solve all of mankind’s problems by leaping over living history in order to arrive at a mathematically perfect solution, which he characterizes as nothing more than the correct arrangements of the corridors and rooms in the phalansteries (people who follow the beliefs of fourierism) - a reference to the communal living arrangements designed by the utopian socialist and mathematician Charles Fourier.

 

-         Raskolnikov’s efforts to imitate the incarnate God challenge the norms of the dominate culture of his time, so, too, Destoevsky’s writing challenges the new normative scientism of the 19^th century.

 

-         Half Baked Ideas = rational utilitarianism, utopian socialism, and new social theories that correlated with the external environment with criminality.

 

Letter Sent to the Editor of the Journal The Russian Messenger

 

A young man…living in extreme poverty, from the immaturity and instability of his thinking, having given in to certain strange half- baked ideas, which are part of the atmosphere, decided to extricate himself from his miserable position at once. He decided to murder an old woman…who lent money for interest. The old woman is stupid, deaf, greedy… “She’s not good for anything,” “what does she live for?”… Such questions bewilder the young man. He decides to kill the old woman and rob her. [PSS 28.2: 136]

 

Petrashevskii's Circle

 http://books.google.com/books?id=kxPriIJd_HAC&pg=PA52&dq=crime+and+punishment+psychology+psychological+analysis+dostoevsky&ei=9gq7R4mcKJ-0iQGtmqDQBQ&sig=AiY3k07vDiIsHCDIKnDlTbl84hA#PPA51,M1

 

Petrashevskii wrote that in “the most recent philosophical theories,” the normal condition is a technical term that signifies “the normality of the development of society and mankind.” His conception of a “normally developed individual” is one in whom all the passions are “harmoniously developed.”

  

As a member of the Petrasheviskii circle in the 1840’s, Dosteoevsky had become familiar with the ideas of Fourier and his disciples. He had also no doubt become familiar with Butashevich- Petrashevskii’s Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words, a radical philosophical tract in the form of a                      dictionary.

 

      - *The entry for “normal condition” contains a whole treatise about the relation between the individual and the environment and the need to             reconstruct society along more “normal lines.” In this little treatise, and in Razumihin’s use of the term “abnormality,” we see the way in which the         language of disease has become assimilarted into moral and political discourse.

 

 

-         The notion of the harmonious reconcilitation of the passions and of their importance for the “normal condition” of the individual is derived from Fourier, who say in human passion a force akin to the universal, nonorganic force of attraction, that is, gravity.

 

 

-         It is the medical student Zossimov who remarks to Raskolikov’s sister that there are very few “harmonious individuals in the world.”

 

 

-         Petrashevskii goes on to say that such normal development depends less on the individual than on society, which must provide him with the minimum necessary for his existence.

 

 -         The normal condition can be said to have been achieved only when “the spirit of unity pervades; and everything that is considered oppressive and repulsive is transformed into a source of the immediate enjoyment of life.”

 

-         For Petrashevskii, the normal condition is an ideal one, in which both the individual and society are in a state of harmony. Once society is reconstructed normally, all the sources of conflict, both internal (the struggle between reason and passion) and external (the conflicts between various members of society) will be removed, and unity will be achieved.

 

 

 Lecture on Crime and Punishment

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~mcneil/lec/lecdost.htm

 

Russian Ideology

Dostoevsky's parable focuses on a particular brand of 19th century 
Russian ideology, as it begins to crystallize in the mind of a young 
idealist. But the modeling procedure Dostoevsky uses in teasing 
out the contradictions of Raskolnikov's unguided application of a 
morally bankrupt theory, could equally well be applied to 
contemporary thinking around several important and equally 
bankrupt modern ideas - ideas harshly criticized by thinkers such 
as Hayek.

Rationalized Theories

 

We know that - Raskolnikov himself eventually came to know that 
too. But the reason his crime wasn't right had nothing to do with 
Raskolnikov's rational theories. Political theories, scientific 
theories, medical theories, anthropological theories, psychological 
theories, as theories are nothing more than intricate exercises in 
calculus. They apply a coherent set of rules to the objects they 
reference. Like arithmetic or calculus this involves plugging in 
values, applying the rules, and observing the consequences. 
Theories as calculus have no moral content. Whatever moral 
framework we as humans use to regulate the operation of theories 
comes from a domain outside of the calculus. This all seems so 
obvious.

 

 More on Theories; Focus's on Rational and Meta- Rational

...the emergence of theories that not 
only deny the importance of a symbiotic relationship between the 
rational and meta-rational, they deny the meta-rational altogether. 
These theories enable their practitioners - like Raskolnikov tries to 
do in our story - to cross over the barriers erected by traditional 
morality, by denying the barriers. They are not meta-rational to 
Raskolnikov; they are irrational. Hence they are destructible. In 
crossing those barriers Raskolnikov is in a position to act outside 
the constraints of good and evil.

Such theories (i.e. those of Raskolnikov) - unlike most ideas we 
draw on to shape our lives and give meaning to our existence - 
actively close off and deny mystery.

 

 OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

 

The rational ideologies that were capturing the imaginations of the 
Russian intelligentsia in the 1860's were a blend of ideas 
influenced by an intermingling of the currents of English 
Utilitarianism (Mill), Utopian Socialism (Marx and others), and 
Social Darwinism: all of these are reflected in some way in the 
character of Raskolnikov.   For example, Raskolnikov's notion that 
superior individuals had the right to act independently for the 
welfare of humanity reflects an influence of Social Darwinism. But 
Dostoevsky's main target seems to have been what has come to be 
known as Russian Nihilism - a rather negative doctrine which 
found nothing to approve in the established order of anything: 
morality, religion or politics.