The brilliant scholar Simon Karlinsky has written about the "lesser tradition in Russian literature," which he associated with the precise and restrained art of Chekhov and Nabokov as opposed to the grand visions and claims of the Tolstoyan or
Dostoevskian kind.
They consider him "a mythic creature, a legend" (182), a "world-historical figure grappling with
Dostoevskian forces" (196).
Janz (1) reports that, sympathetic to the whipping of a horse, Nietzsche would have thrown himself onto the animal's neck, hugging him, and would have later collapsed to the ground, thus embodying a
Dostoevskian character.
[The
Dostoevskian novel] enacts the freedom it discusses....
Her brother dropped out of college to teach English in Russia, from where he occasionally sends me a
Dostoevskian story full of darkness and snow and human suffering.
Significantly, however, the
Dostoevskian hero is no longer an 'objectified image, but a fully weighted discourse [slovo], pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him' (Bakhtin 1994b: 52; 1984: 53): the interaction between seeing, between intentionally impelled discourses sharing a single plane within the novel.
"Carthage explores similar territory [to that of We Were the Mulvaneys] with a new,
Dostoevskian rigour....
Rife with
Dostoevskian scandal (recalling perhaps the "explanation" and failed suicide of Ippolit in The Idiot), the grossly inappropriate and semi-comic treatment of what should be the most serious scene of the film is not only deliberate, in which respect the film itself parallels the theatrics of the holy fool, but in Slavoj Zizek's view, embodies what "elevates Tarkovsky above cheap religious obscurantism." (22) The sacrifice is not only meaningless and irrational according to Zizek, but it is only in this senselessness that the act carries any meaning:
I conclude this paper rejecting Simon Blackburn's idea that 'Anscombe's thought was a version of the
Dostoevskian claim that if God is dead everything is permitted' (Blackburn, 2005, 11) by saying that the work of Anscombe and Foot let us know that ethics survives the death of God.
Caryl Emerson has described
Dostoevskian polyphony as "a dialogue of ideas" in which readers, characters, and author communicate on an "equal plane" ("The First Hundred Years" 128), but the dialogue we find in Tolstoy raises doubts about whether two individuals can occupy an "equal plane" for even a short amount of time.
While he follows Dostoevsky's model on the level of plot structure, Kurosawa unsettled the dynamics of the
Dostoevskian chronotope by placing his own narrative at the margins of his own country.