Virtue and the renunciation of violence in the fiction of Dostoevsky and his European contemporaries (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia)

The present study focuses on Fyodor Dostoevsky's representation of virtue, its significance and the difficulties such representation poses. Virtue is linked with the revelation of the sources of conflict and the renunciation of the violence which arises from such conflict. Dostoevsky's mature works are considered in relation to those of other European novelists, drawing primarily on the mimetic theory elaborated by Rene Girard and secondarily on the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas.; Chapter one offers an exposition of the mimetic theory and an overview of critical gaps in recent modern criticism of Dostoevsky's novels. Chapter two, an analysis of Dostoevsky's “The Meek One” (1876), highlights Dostoevsky's examination of the unseen roots of violence in a story that is meant to be understood as a “text of persecution.” Chapter three employs the metaphor of triangular desire to consider the relation between self-sacrificial behavior and suicide in Dostoevsky's “A Meek One,” in George Sand's early novels Indiana (1832), Jacques (1834), Lucrezia Floriani (1847) and in Chernyshevslzy's What's to be done? (1863).; Chapter four explores the obstacle/model relation in Crime and Punishment (1866) to reveal the “good mimesis” which is under-emphasized in Girard's early critical writing. Sacrifice is depicted in the novel as a species of gift given without expectation of return. Chapter five elaborates the “foolish” virtue of magnanimity in Don Quixote, (1605, 1615), Pickwick Papers (1836) and The Idiot (1868). The quixotic heroes gratuitous acts of charity are examined in relation to the texts interrogations of justice and law.; Chapters six and seven expound the nature of Myshkin's foolish “offense.” Dostoevsky imitates gospel structure to lead his reader to an apprehension of the trap to which conflictive desire leads. Critical difficulty in appreciating Dostoevsky's “perfectly good man” involves recognizing the author's attitude towards altruism and ethical relation. Chapter eight analyzes the mimesis of apprenticeship in the decomposition of Zosima's status as “idol” (obstacle) and the remaking of Zosima as “icon” (model) in Alyosha's experience.; Dostoevsky's representation of virtue serves to advance a cultural critique of a scientistic, materialist epistemology and a secular metaphysic which abets unbalanced individualism.