Dostoevsky the Thinker

Cornell University Press, May 2002. Hardcover. Very Good/As New. Most Dostoevsky criticism proceeds from Dostoevsky the great literary artist to the great philosophical insights that spun out of his creations. James Scanlan has chosen to reverse this sequence and examine Dostoevsky the great thinker whose philosophical insights were expressed in literary modes (''his novels were about ideas as much as about people'' said Victor Terras). Paying special attention not only to the novels but also to Dostoevsky's notebooks and journals, Scanlan formulates the principle focus of his philosophy as ''anthropomorphic, prompted not by abstract cosmological and epistemological concerns but by an obsession with humanity..wthat it means to be a human being.'' Against the rational materialism burgeoning in late nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoevsky posited human beings as ''moral creatures whose standards of both personal conduct and social relationships were provided by the New Testament image of Jesus Christ.'' Scanlan is a fine guide, thoroughly conversant in all the literature, primary and secondary, English and Russian. And he is not uniformly laudatory; Dostoevsky's reactionary and autocratic political views, and especially his Russian messianism, come in for devastating critique. But ultimately Dostoevsky emerges as one who could philosophically and artistically connect the possibility of faith in God with love of the neighbor, and do so in a way that makes his shortcomings an eccentric oddity and his central insights perennially relevant . Owner inscription, jacket and text appear almost as new.