The Metropolis, Madness, Morality and Crises of Faith in Dostoevskii and Postmodern World Literature


Shawn the punk rocker of the Metropolis, photo by Anthony M. Obiedzinski

Hello and welcome to my literary blog. I will elaborate regarding the scope and focus of my forays into examining the ways in which current literary scholars engage with the great works of Dostoevsky using critical methods and theories to elucidate the themes of F.M. Dostoevsky.

This blog is experimental in nature: I am writing to explain my process of learning and engaging with assigned texts in the graduate literaure class, ENG605: Dostoevsky, taught by Dr. Lubkemann-Allen at SUNY Brockport in upstate/western New York. 

My main concern in writing this blog is to articulate how I am making connections and engaging with contemparary literary scholarship, the works of Dostevskii, and with Postmodern texts in World Literature, e.g. "The Master and the Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. I am familiar with the novel, but to be honest, I don't know much about it except for its recontextualization and reframing and echoingof the works of Dostoevsky in some way. So this should be fun and interesting, learning and all that fancy stuff...

So far, in the second week of the semester, in the texts of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii, and in Postmodern dialogues engaging with him, I am intuiting a connection among specific themes and motifs featured in the writings centered around the metropolis, such as questions of morality and those concerning faith. As my graduate English class on Dostoevskii commenced only recently, I am familiar enough with Dostoevskii the man and the author to know that he concerns himself and wrestles with opposing viewpoints regarding morality and faith. And in this class, our main focus is to develop investigative forays into madness, lunatics and "Holy Fools" in our assigned texts and their relation to urbane consciousness in 19th-century Russian literature and in Postmodern world literature. I ask, "How are are these key themes and motifs--madness, morality and crises of faith--in urban, industrial and post-industrial societies, represented and interconnected in terms of their various cultural, geographical and historical contexts?" We shall soon find out. This is only the beginning of my thinking about the critical lenses through which to examine and explicate what I have above stated. With the aid of scholarship by Dostoevskii scholars, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Frank, among others such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Eichenbaum, I am confident that I will be able to make meaningful connections to advance the critical scholarship of Fyodor M. Dostoevskii. Thank you for reading.


--Anthony M. Obiedzinski

Location: Rochester, NY, USA

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