| Dostoevsky's great tragic characters dramatize the moral, philosophical and religious themes that permeate his great novels: Crime and Punishment (1866), the Idiot (1868--9), the Devils (1871--2) and the Brothers Karamazov (1879--80). For Dostoevsky, these characters embody the destructive and self-destructive consequences of the ideas of atheism, nihilism and egoism that the Russian intelligentsia absorbed largely from the West. These consequences take the form of a despairing faithlessness, valuelessness and lovelessness in human life. Almost without exception, Dostoevsky's great tragic characters, who embody the despair of the existence bleached and blighted by these ideas, are driven to suicide. This dissertation is a study of these characters: how they embody this despair, why they are driven to suicide. |
