DREAMERS AND LONERS "Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely." -Erma Bombeck Even though dreamers have their own personal dream, these dreams can take up a lot of their time. All that time lost can make someone lonely and disconnected from the real world. A dreamer can be lonely because of his lack with human interaction in which causes them to create fantasies. In 19th century Russian literature, St. Petersburg, the manmade city of Russia, seems to be a famous place for dreamers to roam. The narrator of White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky and the character of Piskarev from Nevsky Prospect by Nikolai Gogol, both share the quality of being lonely which leads them to become dreamers when Piskarev falls for a prostitute …show more content…
He first falls for a prostitute, but upon learning of her ways, he is disgusted and makes her better in his mind. He conjures her over and over again in his dreams, visualizing her as an innocent, beautiful soul. Piskarev dreams happen because he could not find out why she was a prostitute. However it keeps him from reality thus thinking he can save the prostitute and make her into a house wife and his personal muse, as she is in his dreams. When he goes to the prostitute and tries to get her to leave with him, she rejects him. With the hurt of rejection, Piskarevs’ dream vanishes. He then “locked himself in his room and let no one in” which he look a razor and slit his throat (Gogol P.266). Without the "changed" prostitute, Piskarev could not even bear to live. Without her in his dreams he commits suicide. The characters are alienated from reality with little contact with other people. Instead both men created scenarios in which they find happiness in. Piskarev is so addicted to his dreams of a prostitute that he develops insomnia. To control it he takes opium. He does this in order to see his dream woman over and over again. When Piskarev comes home from getting the drug “he swallowed it and dropped off to sleep. God, what joy! She again!” (Gogol P 263). The woman of his dreams is who Piskarev was addicted to, not the prostitute herself. The story doesn’t show much of her, until she rejects his …show more content…
For a while, both men are not exposed to reality since they live in their dream world and do not plan for the whole situation to turn into a nightmare. Hooked on his opium-induced dreams, Piskarev loses his grip on reality altogether. Suddenly it occurs to him that he should go and rescue his beauty from prostitution like a Romantic character of the St. Petersburg tradition. The character of this tradition includes a noble male saving a prostitute who is a victim of society. In Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground the narrator promises to save the prostitute. Influenced by this tradition Piskarev goes and finds the prostitute and explains to her that they could both work in order to afford things and make their life great. He was confident that she would take his proposal thereby fulfilling his dreams of her being a house wife and a muse. However, the prostitute replied back to Piskarev “What! I’m no laundress or seamstress that I should do any work.” (Gogol P266) In other words, she seems to enjoy her life as a prostitute and rejects him. Since Piskarev is very disconnected to the world he does not know how to deal with utter rejection. If he cannot accept the corruption in reality, he does not know how to move on from his mourning and takes the next inevitable step, suicide. Piskarev is in love not with the prostitute herself, but the prostitute turned angel in his
The short story, “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”, explicates the life of a man named Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka. We see him briefly in his young years, followed by his life in the army, and his return to the farm where his strong characterized aunt resides. We can see immediately that this man lives in constant cleanliness and dutiful paranoia; these are some of his desires that he wishes to exhibit to others. We can also see his fears, which reside in the confiscation of his masculinity and independence. This short story has many elements that resemble others in the Nikolai Gogol collection.
In “Nevsky Prospect,” the third person narrator pulls double duty by describing two stories that parallel each other in time. After describing the seemingly harmless bustling avenue, mustaches, and clothing of Nevsky Prospect, the narrator happens to come upon two different characters: an artist and an officer. First, he follows the artist and right away, the narrator seems to be absorbed in the world of the artist. We see this occur when it is often hard to tell when the artist is dreaming or awake. The narrator does not initially make it clear when the artist is dreaming, which can be disorienting for the reader.
In Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” he tells about Pózdnyshev telling a man about him killing his own wife. He described it and as a reader you can understand that this is something that will deeply set in his conscious for the rest of his life. As a younger man, Pozdnyshev went and had many sexual relations with many prostitutes and went to many different brothels. Pozdnyshev was a man that greatly loved sex, but these choices and act...
She then moves on to be a gracious host to all of these men, again showing success in her womanly duties. Later that night one of the visitors, Sextus Tarquinis, comes into her room, and forces himself upon her, telling her that if she does not comply he will make it look like she had an affair with one of the servants (Livy, 101). She yields to him because she does not want it to seem as if she had an affair and is not able to explain what occurred.... ... middle of paper ...
As the story unfolds, Dostoevsky introduces the reader to Raskolnikov, a troubled young man who is extremely isolated from those who surround him. He lives in a small, dingy, dusty, and dirty room in a small unattractive house. He lives in an abstract world neglecting the real. He is quite separate from all the people with whom he has contact. In the opening chapter, Raskolnikov is said to be, "so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but any one at all" (1). People come physically close to him, but everyone is forced to remain distant mentally. He walks through the crowded, noisy, dirty streets of St. Petersburg physically but somehow he never does so mentally, moving through the streets like a zombie, not a man. He is not aware of his location and often jostles bewildered pedestrians. Therefore, at the outset of the novel Dostoevsky illustrates the apparent schism between the mind and body of Raskolnikov.
Dostoyevsky's writing in this book is such that the characters and setting around the main subject, Raskolnikov, are used with powerful consequences. The setting is both symbolic and has a power that affects all whom reside there, most notably Raskolnikov. An effective Structure is also used to show changes to the plot's direction and Raskolnikov's character. To add to this, the author's word choice and imagery are often extremely descriptive, and enhance the impact at every stage of Raskolnikov's changing fortunes and character. All of these features aid in the portrayal of Raskolnikov's downfall and subsequent rise.
From the moment when Raskalnikov murders the old woman, his personality begins to change drastically. Dostoevsky challenges the reader to understand the madness which ensues by first demonstrating that the ideas and convictions to which Raskalnikov clung died along with the women. While the reader struggles with this realization, Dostoevsky incorporates the Biblical legend of Lazarus as a symbolic mirror for Raskalnikov's mind. By connecting the two, the reader encounters the foreshadowing of a rebirth of morals and beliefs, though what form this may assume remains cryptic. As references to Lazarus continue to occur, the feeling of parallelism increases in intensity. Just as Raskalnikov slowly struggled through madness, Lazarus lay dying of a terrible disease. When Lazarus eventually dies, Raskalnikov mimes this by teetering on the edge of insanity, the death of the mind. Eventually Sonya begins to pull Raskalnikov back to reality by relieving a portion of his guilt. As his Christ figure, she accomplishes this by providing the moral and spiritual sturdiness which Raskalnikov lost after his debasement during the murders. Sonya affects him not by active manipulation, but via her basic character, just as Christ personified his beliefs through the manner in which he lived his life. No matter what Raskalnikov says or does to her, she accepts it and looks to God to forgive him, just as Jesus does in the Bible. This eventually convinces Raskalnikov that what he did was in fact a crime and that he must repent for it and"seek atonement".
In such poor living conditions, those that the slums of Russia has to offer, the characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment1 struggle, living day to day. Raskolnikov, the protagonist, experiences multiple layers of suffering (the thought of his murder causes him greater suffering than does his poverty) as does Sonia and Katerina Ivanovna (1). Through these characters as well as Porfiry Petrovitch, Dostoevsky wants the reader to understand that suffering is the cost of happiness and he uses it to ultimately obliterate Raskolnikov’s theory of an ubermensch which allows him to experience infinite love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment begins with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov living in poverty and isolation in St. Petersburg. The reader soon learns that he was, until somewhat recently, a successful student at the local university. His character at that point was not uncommon. However, the environment of the grim and individualistic city eventually encourages Raskolnikov’s undeveloped detachment and sense of superiority to its current state of desperation. This state is worsening when Raskolnikov visits an old pawnbroker to sell a watch. During the visit, the reader slowly realizes that Raskolnikov plans to murder the woman with his superiority as a justification. After the Raskolnikov commits the murder, the novel deeply explores his psychology, yet it also touches on countless other topics including nihilism, the idea of a “superman,” and the value of human life. In this way, the greatness of Crime and Punishment comes not just from its examination of the main topic of the psychology of isolation and murder, but the variety topics which naturally arise in the discussion.
The tone of “Notes from Underground” is sharp, strange and bitter. The bitterness of the book is traced to the multiple personal misfortunes the author suffered as he wrote his novel. Through these personal tragedies it can be argued that the author presented the position of the “underground man” through his own experiences. Additionally, the research holds the second belief that the novel’s presentation of “underground man” is founded on the social context the novel addresses (Fanger 3). Through this, it was found that Dostoevsky presented the suffering of man under the emerging world view directed by European materialism, liberalism and utopianism. As he began writing his novel, Dostoevsky had been directed by the romantic error that looked at utopian social life and the social vision of satisfying and perfecting regular life for man. The failure for the society to gain these achievements was as a result of the distant liberalism and materialism that reduced the power of reasoning and...
This shows that an idea like Raskolnikov's ordinary and extraordinary people can lead to horrible things like his murder of the two women but also hints at the fact it in the future may lead to a "great future deed". It is especially interesting to see that the idea put forth by Dostoevsky in the end is one of love being a transformative force. That this love comes from the severely religious Sonya, mirrors the idea of Christ's "new word" being love. Through careful examination of Raskolnikov's idea and its use as a metric for looking at the character one is better able to understand the novel, the character, and the possible larger implications of that message.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's remarkable insight into the psychology of man is seen here in the development of Raskolnikov's dream on the beating of a horse by drunken peasants. The dream is significant on several planes, most notably in the parallel of events in the dream with Raskolnikov's plan to murder the old pawnbroker. It also serves as perhaps the most direct example of the inseparable tie between events of the author's life with the psychological evolution of his protagonists, as well as lesser characters, through the criminal minds of Raskolnikov, Rogozhin, Stavrogin, and Smerdyakov, and into the familial relationships of The Brother's Karamazov.2
After the botched crime Raskolnikov is plagued his failures. "He was conscious at the time that he had forgotten something that he ought not forget, and he tortured himself." (107) After he carelessly kills both women, and allows for the evidence to be found, Raskolnikov realizes he did not commit the perfect crime. This devastates his ego, so he tries to cling to his previous self perception. He is also plagued with feelings of guilt. His guilt, combined with the mistakes he made during the crime, shatter his self perception of perfection.
Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker ,Alena Ivanovna, not for the money or the valuables she had in her apartment.The reasoning behind Raskolnikov wanting to kill Alena is because she is immoral, who cheats the poor and considers her as a creature. She would brutally beat and abuse her step-sister, and pressure her do all the dirty work for her. After killing Alyona Ivanovna, Raskolnikov steals her possessions. Instead of selling the items , Raskolnikov hides the objects under a rock. Raskolnikov reasons this murder was for the greater good for the people, because Alyona’s money could go to help the people of the town. Raskolnikov knew no one would have the strength or means to get rid of “this creature” referring to Alyona Ivanovna. Raskolnikov thoug...
It also introduces the reader to Raskolnikov’s schizophrenic nature. These are parts of his psyche which had been hidden until the dream sequence. Knowing that Raskolnikov is capable of compassion makes him a more relatable and likeable character. Later, Svidrigailov dreams of helping and comforting a young girl only to find that she has been transformed into an evil