Книга учёного-позитивиста Дж. Стюарта Милля «О подчинении женщины» в «Кроткой»

This article analyzes "A Gentle Creature" - a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - as a film adaptationdirected by Mariusz Treliński, taking up the issue of intersemiotic translation. It also explores relationsbetween literature and film, such as narrative matters, time, space, the character concept and theways to express literary reality using cinematic methods. It brings up the social and cultural contextsin both mediums as well.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story “A Gentle Creatureˮ, first published by the writer in 1876 as the November issue of his “Diary of a Writerˮ, is usually viewed in the context of the author's discourse on suicide contained in the previous issue of The “Diary of a Writerˮ, where the writer’s lot is described as an in-depth interpretation of life. At the same time, the theme of suicide is also brought up in connection with the overwhelming task of interpreting the event. However, the writer ultimately changed his writing strategy to produce “A Gentle Creatureˮ. Basing the story on an actual case of a suicide committed by a young woman amplified with autobiographical details, Dostoevsky develops a narrative model with complexity exceeding that of the original interpretation of the fact while in its essence being equivalent to the complexity of reality itself. The images of a straight line and a dot, employed by the author to interpret the event and the text of the short story, demonstrate that the author sees as a problem converting true-life information into a compressed narrative. Thus, in his short story “A Gentle Creatureˮ Dostoevsky offers the reader a model as complex as the life itself.

Background: The article deals with the intertextual analysis of two novellas: The Barrier by Pavel Vezhinov and A Gentle Creature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The methodological basis of the study is the interpretation of intertextuality as a product of reading (not the phenomenon of “writing”), according to which Vezhinov and Dostoevsky – writers belonging to different national cultures and historical eras – in some sense become contemporaries. Accordingly, A Gentle Creature, written earlier, is enriched by the meaning as a result of its comparison with The Barrier, as well as the latter by comparison with the story of Dostoevsky. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the intertextual connections of Pavel Vezhinov’s novella The Barrier and A Gentle Creature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and to show how they deepen the content of both works in the reader’s perception. The analysis of texts is carried out within one level – the artistic space, which is “an author’s model of the world, expressed in the language of his spatial representations”. Results: Comparative analysis of the elements of spatial code and analysis of the characters’ behavior through the type of artistic space corresponding to each of them allows to understand the in-depth content of each of the two works. The storyline of both stories is based on one type of rite de passage – the transition from life “to another life”. The expected result of this transition is a radical spiritual transformation of the character and a new identity acquired by them. The events that make up the plot, in the two stories largely coincide and the last in their series is the suicide of the female character. The main character of The Barrier is a person who has gone astray and wanders within an open plane space. Meeting him with Doroteya, the character of the “vertically directed path” within the “open, voluminous space”, provokes the beginning of the “spiritual transformation” in him. However, the suicide of the female character again throw Antoni over the "barrier" of social conditioning that he managed to overcome with the help of Doroteya, and makes it impossible for him to acquire a “new identity”. The pawnbroker from A Gentle Creature is a “character of the point space” who has never been able to “expand the space” throughout the story. However, the suicide of the female character is reported as such an event, from which a real rite de passage can begin for the character, culminating in his acquisition of a way up and a radical spiritual transformation. Key words: intertextuality, artistic space, rite de passage, spiritual transformation, transfiguration.

This article studies the poetics of gesture in Dostoevsky’s short story A Gentle Creature , which has never been a subject of a specific focus in studies dedicated to Dostoevsky. The purpose of the article is to analyse the characters’ gesture behaviour in the moments of despair and to show how modern theatres staging this short story reflect the importance of the non-verbal layer of human portrayal in the artistic world of A Gentle Creature . The author of the article concludes that the key kinetic motifs of the short story (moving towards one another and looking at one another) become particularly important in the critical episodes of the narration: walking around the body of a dead wife, the battle of wills in the episode with the revolver, the suicide of the Gentle Creature, etc. Gestures related to viewing reveal the desire to understand the other person. Understanding another person’s truth starts with a glance at the body of a dead woman. Gestures of looking aside and closing one’s eyes which ones sees in the episode with the revolver show refusal to understand another person’s sufferings. Analysis of gestures describing movements of the Pawnbroker and the Gentle Creature towards one another shows that the characters try to get closer in turn, but continuously move away from each other instead. The suicide of the Gentle Creature is a gesture that becomes a deed: the heroine chooses a movement that does not bring her closer to the Pawnbroker but takes her farther away from him. Referring to theatrical productions made by the Masterskaya St Petersburg Theatre and the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre, the author shows that the message hidden in the short story at the gesture level is perceived by modern culture in the context of the dialogue problem. The theatre reveals the contradiction between the actual isolation of a person from others and their need to be understood, loved, and accepted in Dostoevsky’s text.

Among the works included in A writer’s diary by Fyodor Dostoevsky, literary scholars point out the “fantastic trilogy” – The dream of a ridiculous man, A gentle creature, and Bobok. Three heroes of Dostoevsky, three outsiders who are in conflict with their environment – a ridiculous man, an underground man and a drunken writer – are the main characters of the “fantastic trilogy”. The article examines the poetological principle of laughter, on which the ontology of Dostoevsky’s artistic world is based. In the aforementioned three short stories three varieties of laughter are identified: 1) laughter as a result of realizing the incompatibility of the truth of the heart with the necessity to live here and now (The dream of a ridiculous man, 1877); 2) laughter as Bakhtin’s genre-forming principle: muffled laughter, that is, laughter that is not heard, which is an expression of the impossibility of resolving a dispute, the impossibility of saying the last word about a problematic world, about its dual truthfulness – the truth of the heart and the truth of the mind (A gentle creature, also titled as The meek one, 1876); 3) a type of parodic laughter, or laughter that laughs out loud (Bobok, 1873).

Nabokov Studies 4 (1997) From the Editor Demands of space require that this column be brief. It will be. Instead of the usual reflections on some "significant problem " generated by the commonalities among the essays that were not published, I will limit my remarks to descriptions of the essays that make up this volume. Dividing its space almost evenly among established scholars and relative newcomers to the field, Volume 4 of Nabokov Studies brings one more reminder that Nabokov studies does not assimilate readily to a single critical discourse. Nor is there even a hint of thematic conformity despite the lively tug-of-war between intellectual rigor and generosity, the attendant tensions that characterized the process of editorial intervention for this volume (making that process almost twice as long as that required by Volume 3). Quite simply, when the dust raised by methodological jousting settles, it becomes clear that because the definitions of what is central to Nabokov studies continue to undergo complex shifts, both the center and the margin, tradition and innovation, Russian and English, Nabokov's early and later works exert their profound contextual "pull" in this volume. And that is as it should be. Such balance is desirable. Donald Barton Johnson concerns himself with origins and in a neat bit of detective work unearths the crossing where butterfly hunting, scholarship, and biography met to produce a Smurov the modalities of whose being take their contours both from the "climactic conditions prevailing in various souls" and from butterfly systematics. Where Johnson searches for Nabokov's models in historical and scientific reality, Julian Connolly turns to literature and in a subtle and convincing influence study finds that in Lolita viii Nabokov Studies Nabokov has appropriated the lurid and solipsistic despair of Dostoevsky's "The Gentle Creature" in order to use it for an entirely original purpose—as a springboard for "an affirmation of timeless beauty. " Inverting the approach used by Connolly, Priscilla Meyer seeks internal rather than external analogues and finds that in parodying the Doppelgänger theme Nabokov had constructed a complex system of echoes and inversions that bind Despair and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in fascinating ways. Taking the same "inward" path, Svetlana Polsky rescues Nabokov's short story "Easter Rain" from archival oblivion only to find that it is but the first of a series of multilingual excursions into the realm where autobiography relies on the full resources of fiction for one of the noblest human goals—preservation. The Russian "Easter Rain" (1925) would reappear in complex disguises as first French (1936) and then English (1943) "Mademoiselle 0." and continue to manifest itself in Conclusive Evidence (1951), Drugie berega (1954), resettling into its final English form in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966). The multiple tentacles Nabokov ascribes to fate preoccupy Stephen Blackwell as he teases out the "poetics of fate" from the act of reading that Nabokov thematizes as an exploit the point of which "is not so much a vision of ultimate reality" but "a series of metaphors for a vision which remains largely unexpressed. " While the essays of both Anat Ben-Amos and Anna Brodsky center on The Gift and occasionally appear to echo and extend each other, they are more profitably read as set in potential dialogue. What is at stake is nothing less than the claim for the ability of literature (and specifically Nabokov's art) to constitute , transform, and replace reality. The common complaint against structuralist critics that they talk only to each other may not be lodged against Vladimir MyI- From the Editor ix nikov's essay. Innocent of any post-structuralist air of connoisseurship , Mylnikov's text-book structuralism shows why "Christmas" is one of Nabokov's best stories: its details still invite and reward the re-reader. This essay itself in many ways hearkens back nostalgically to a model of scholarship established by war-isolated Eric Auerbach—a scholar working by himself on a single work without the burden of the sometimes paralyzing but certainly always attenuating critical apparatus of non-literary discourses we now take for granted. Though not commissioned, unless provocation is synonymous with commission, Brian Boyd's Forum piece is an impassioned...

Angels and Demons in the Moral Vision of Auguste Comte Mary Pickering The feminine revolution now must complete the proletarian revolution, just as the latter consolidated the bourgeois revolution, which first emanated from the philosophical revolution. Auguste Comte, 1852 In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill wrote, "One can to an almost laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his opinions about women in general."1 Whereas Mill is considered a leading feminist of the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, is regarded as one of the era's greatest misogynists. Reading the letters between these two men tussling over the "woman question" and Comte's major work of the 1830s and 40s, the Cours de philosophie positive, many scholars have dismissed Comte as yet another advocate of women's subordination.2 However, this article will demonstrate that his attitudes toward women were complex, contradictory, and variable. Like many of his contemporaries, Comte was basically an essentialist, who maintained that women were different from men. As Michèle Le Doeuff has remarked, the current "feminism of difference ... is apparently unaware of how much it owes to Auguste Comte."3 Yet throughout his life, he wavered on how he regarded the differences between men and women. In the beginning and end of his life, he valorized the differences, while in the middle, he deplored them and tended toward misogyny. These changes reflect, on the one hand, his own relationship with his wife and other women, as Mill implies; on the other hand, they point to tensions in the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. Such inconsistencies of thought, particularly regarding the representation of women, reveal the sites of contestation in the culture at large.4 The questions that I will address include the following: How and why did Comte's attitudes toward women change? What effect, if any, did these changes have on the scientific doctrine of positivism? And finally, what do these changes tell us about the underlying tensions in the patriarchal culture of the early nineteenth century—a culture that found its claim to hegemony increasingly difficult to maintain? Comte first alluded to the "woman question" in 1819, while involved at the age of twenty-one in an affair with a married woman. He wrote to © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 2 (Summer) 1996 Mary Pickering 11 his childhood friend Pierre Valat that this "half of the human species is worth . . . mfinitely more than the other [half]." Expressing staunchly feminist sentiments, he explained that he hoped to compensate for the "general offenses" of his sex, because "women ... have suffered so much from the males of their species." A male typically manipulated the "horrible law of the strongest" to lord it over a woman, whom he regarded as a "domestic animal" or "toy destined for all eternity for the good pleasure and usage of his Majesty Man." Comparing women to other oppressed groups, slaves and serfs, Comte lamented that a poor woman, to survive, had to sell her body or work in the hardest, worst paid jobs imaginable. Men left women the "very smallest number of professions and the least lucrative ones." Progress, according to Comte, included not only women's liberation from male domination but improvements in their economic status. Yet, because he recognized that class, race, and gender issues were linked, he maintained that women would not be freed until all men achieved their liberty. Thus women everywhere should be "liberals," for their own social and political conditions would improve only with the general advance of civilization.5 In implying that women had political rights and in condemning the Napoleonic Code, which legalized the patriarchal system and denied them citizenship, Comte suggested that they should become engaged in public affairs. Women could then ensure that moral force—the "law of common interests"—would supersede arbitrary physical force—the "law of the strongest"—to become the directing power of society.6 Born in 1798, Comte was deeply influenced by the feminist discourse that developed around the time of the French Revolution, when women used equal rights arguments to support their demand for a role in the new...

It is often said that short stories do not sell well because readers prefer novels. Yet the short story has recently made a comeback. As Sam Baker observed in a 2014 article in The Telegraph, the brevity of the genre seems the perfect fit for our fast-paced life. “Many people struggle to find the time to engage with a full-length novel. A short story offers the perfect antidote—it's the equivalent of listening to a single track of music instead of the whole album” (Baker, “Irresistible”). These miniature literary worlds of short stories are a distillation of few emotions and ideas authenticated by a meticulous care for details, which manage to keep alive the audience's short attention span. In France, the annual Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle sustains the interest in the short story by recognizing polyvalent writers who have also distinguished themselves in other genres, from the two most recent winners—Regis Jauffret and Caroline Lamarche—to internationally renowned previous awardees like André Chedid, René Depestre, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. And while the Italian Strega Prize awarded in the 1950s to collections of short stories by writers of the caliber of Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, and Dino Buzzati are considered the exception to the rule, more recent eloquent signs of the return of the short story on the international scene are the Nobel Prize to the Canadian writer Alice Munro, the Folio Prize to the American George Saunders, and the Man Booker International Prize to the American “flash-fiction” writer Lydia Davis.Among contemporary short-story writers who convey “perfect, nuanced, subtle, luminous understanding and expression of people's lives, of the human heart” (Baker, “Irresistible”), the name of Jhumpa Lahiri stands out. A multicultural author at the crossroads of three different continents (born in London from Bengali parents and brought up in New England), she has authored novels such as The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), yet the short story is the literary form that has defined her more distinctly so far. Her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), received the O. Henry Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award), to be followed by Unaccustomed Earth (2008), winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and, more recently, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019)—also available in Italian as Racconti italiani (2019)—to which Jhumpa Lahiri has contributed as editor and co-translator.1Precisely this latter editorial endeavor offers an engaging vantage point from which to delve into Lahiri's compelling journey into literatures and languages. The plural, in Lahiri's case, is de rigueur, considering not only her deep exploration of tensions and negotiations between Indian and Anglo-American traditions but also, more surprisingly, her bold decision to problematize this binarism by embracing a third culture, the Italian one, going as far as selecting its language for her own literary creation, despite having no prior personal, family, or historical connections with it. With The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri shows the power of storytelling and translation to widen the horizon of understanding and create connections. She makes ideas travel, challenging cultural monopolies and the constraints of identity politics.Italy has amply contributed to the multifaceted tradition of the short story—from the novelle of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone to its sixteenth-century followers Matteo Bandello and Anton Francesco Doni, the seventeenth-century Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile, Adriano Banchieri's I Trastulli di Villa, Giovanni Sagredo's witty L'Arcadia in Brenta, and the eighteenth-century Novelle morali by Francesco Soave. But it is in the late nineteenth century that the genre burgeons in Western culture, thanks to leading writers from Edgar Allan Poe (who, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” recodifies its rules regarding length, ending, and unity of effect) to Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Anton Čechov, among many others. The Italian short story follows suit, increasing exponentially not only in output but also in variety of subjects and approaches, effectively marking the transition from romanticism to realism, naturalism, and aestheticism. The genre continues to thrive in the twentieth century, when it acquires more nuanced and complex features, blurring historical and geographical borders, and blending different registers and styles borrowed from travel writing, autobiography, social critique, and psychological inquiry.Jhumpa Lahiri's The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories captures this substantial and diverse production and recasts it creatively, offering a refreshing image of Italian authors not simply as members of a national corpus but also as contributors to an imaginative process and a critical discourse addressing timely global questions across national borders. The wealth of authors included in Lahiri's anthology attests to the pervasiveness of the short story in post-unification Italy. This is all the more intriguing because, paradoxically, early twentieth-century intellectuals were lamenting the provincialism of Italy on the international literary scene, which they ascribed to the lack of a sustained production of powerful novels able to engage a vast array of interlocutors inside and outside the newly-born nation. Apart from a few exceptions, namely Alessandro Manzoni and Giovanni Verga (albeit not exempt from criticism for their detached representation of popular classes), Antonio Gramsci deplored the Italian novel as rhetorical and petty, devoid of authentic national-popular and universal human content (Marxismo, 121–22). Likewise, in 1929 Leo Ferrero declared that Italy renounced Europe because Italian writers knew neither their country nor the outside world. In order to have an international dimension, a novelist should depict his/her own nation inspired by moral sentiment, political passion, and the sense of tradition, but always implying other countries at the same time (“Perché l'Italia,” 21–29). Lahiri's renewed attention to the Italian short story challenges this static and provincial view of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian cultural scene. Her anthology foregrounds a literary milieu in great ferment, with a surprisingly multifarious narrative activity that innovates from the point of view of both content and form, in dialogue with international interlocutors that facilitate aesthetic experimentation and a broader circulation of ideas.Any anthology is the result of its editor's personal choices as to what to include and what to leave out. The editor's imprint on The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is, all the more reason, particularly significant. A peculiar element is, for instance, Lahiri's decision to bypass chronology2 and to arrange the stories in reverse alphabetical order, starting from Elio Vittorini, the renowned novelist, translator, and literary critic, editor of the anthology Americana which, in 1941, brought to the Italian audience the most important (and at that time still rather unknown) American authors—from Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Steinbeck to James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Fante, deeply influencing the literary consciousness of a fascist-dominated nation.Arguably, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories will be remembered as Jhumpa Lahiri's Italian anthology in the same way in which we have crystallized in our minds this illustrious predecessor with whom, not accidentally, she engages on several levels, in conversation with his exemplary endeavor, as she explains in her own introduction: “Vittorini was my guiding light as I assembled this book […] and it is in homage to him and to that landmark work—to the spirit of saluting distant literary comrades, of looking beyond borders and of transforming the unknown into the familiar—that I offer the present contribution” (Penguin “Introduction,” xxi).Roland Barthes, in his seminal article “Reflections on a Manual” claims that “the literary manual and the literary text, the pedagogy and the practice of literature have nothing of consequence to do with each other. […] Teaching prefers history to literature because historical facts—in their traditional sense of a narrative sequence of events that are codified, categorized, put in a precise order—“make sense,” whereas literature “unmakes” sense (Barthes “Reflections,” 70, my emphasis). “The literary manual seeks to impose an imperialistic discipline that literature repudiates” (Barthes, 70). These remarks are particularly appropriate to Lahiri's operation. Her new order (or, intentionally, lack thereof) aims to offer a fresher image of Italian literature and culture, to tell a new story about Italy that perhaps the Italian eye would not capture while following the traditional, regimented concatenation of cause and effect, the logical thread of past and present, the genealogy of literary masters and disciples. Each work in her anthology speaks to us on its own terms, be it penned by canonical authors like Verga, Pirandello, Svevo, Moravia, Sciascia, and Calvino, well-established or emerging female signatures from Deledda, Morante, Ortese, and Ginzburg to Cialente and Campo, or niche writers like D'Eramo, Delfini, D'Arzo, or Bianciardi, independently of periodization and canonical influences. The variety of Italian regions, from Sicily to Tuscany and Friuli Venezia-Giulia is not only represented by the authors' diverse geographical origins but also emerges from the setting of the stories. Likewise, pivotal historical conjunctures provide the background to numerous plots, offering insights into the social and political evolution of Italy, from the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the woman's question, and the avant-garde, to fascism and the postwar years.Lahiri also transcends the standard notion-based authors' biographies. She crafts fresh portrayals of writers, unencumbered by many dates, titles of major works, and the usual salient information. She does not linger on technicalities, but rather brings writers and stories to life, in little cameos made of curious unfamiliar facts, impressions, and contacts that these writers established and that their stories fostered. One recurring factor in this rich network of relationships is the pioneering role of periodicals as promoters of innovative poetics and international synergies that delineate a much more dynamic literary scene than the conventional framework would suggest. Indeed, numerous stories in her collection were published in leading journals across the political spectrum (La Tribuna; La Stampa; Il Corriere della sera; L'Unità) and in magazines (Omnibus, L'Europeo, La fiera letteraria, Oggi, Comunità, Il Mondo, Città, Lettere d'oggi, Letteratura, Tempo presente, Cronache, Le grandi firme)—many of them no longer in print, hence offering captivating snapshots of forgotten cultural scenarios. Students will find these profiles very accessible and palatable. Even Italian scholars already familiar with these authors will have a chance to discover or refresh many intriguing facets of their careers and approaches to literature, beyond canonical, crystallized images.The unavoidable question emerges as to what extent this anthology speaks about Lahiri herself. Her prominence as a writer tempts us to read her selections of Italian authors and material through the lens of her overall poetics. Even without implying an intentional correlation, commonalities emerge between the stories she has edited and her own works, and this adds relevance to the volume beyond its immediate scope. Translation, for instance, is an approach and a practice that she shares with numerous authors in her anthology, who intensely worked with foreign texts or who had exposure to linguistic and cultural environments beyond their native Italy, in ways that fertilized their identity and creativity. Besides Vittorini, who learned English by translating Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and, as we have seen, moved on to becoming a pivotal mediator between the United States and Italy, Lahiri features other writers who participated in multiple linguistic and cultural contexts. We find the well-known examples of Italo Svevo (who was educated in German, spoke Triestine dialect at home, and learned English with James Joyce) and Italo Calvino (who was born in Cuba, lived in France, and consistently investigated language and translation), as well as of other prominent figures like Cesare Pavese (translator of Melville, DosPassos, and Joyce), Beppe Fenoglio (a translator of Coleridge and Hopkins, who also wrote his last novel in English), Anna Banti (prolific translator from French and English—Colette, Woolf, Austen, Thackeray), and Antonio Tabucchi (who lived and taught in Portugal, wrote extensively about its literature, and published in Portuguese). Numerous less iconic figures reinforce this plurilingual and multicultural framework, which makes it reductive to qualify them with a single adjective of nationality. For instance, Cristina Campo was self-taught in many languages, and translated Dickinson, Donne, Carlos Williams, and Weil; Fausta Cialente, a rootless Sardinian who died in England, translated James and Alcott; Tommaso Landolfi, a lover of foreign languages, was competent in French, Spanish, German, and English, studied Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Swedish, and Russian, and wrote about Gogol and Akhmatova; Alba De Cespedes, a Cuban by birth, moved to Italy and then to France, published her first novel in French and translated it into Italian; Anna Maria Ortese lived in Libya as a child, and Fabrizia Ramondino was raised in Spain, France, and Germany.This pervasive foreignness embedded into the authors' alleged Italianness raises questions about the boundaries and meaning of national identity, which are magnified by other instances of linguistic and cultural transfer in the stories, and foreground the asymmetries and obstacles in interpersonal relations. Dialogues and exchanges reveal an intrinsic alterity that turns individuals into strangers even in their own linguistic and cultural environment. This communicative and psychological schism finds a paradigmatic example in Parise's story “Melancholy,” where the term “estranged” (54) insistently connotes the female protagonist's self-perception.Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark (1992), shows how most great novels of the American canon (by white male writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald) conceal within themselves the unnamable but fundamental presence of otherness—in those cases black identity, necessary to the mainstream writers' own cultural self-definition. In Lahiri's anthology, too, we find authors, characters, situations, and issues that we could define as, if not unnamable, at least problematic, provocative, and marginalized, because they undermine certainties, expectations, and traditional values. Questions of identity and belonging in the stories are often predicated upon hybridity3 and mutability, which, as Lahiri herself observes in her introduction, converge in the recurring topos of the metamorphosis. These transformations effectively capture the great contradictions of any culture, debunking the myth of cultural purity and of the monolithic nation. Not accidentally, various authors in her anthology—among them Alvaro, Svevo, Pirandello, Sciascia, Cialente, Bilenchi—underscore the regional element in their own autobiographical background as much as in the peripheral geographical and cultural setting of their own stories. In the age of globalism and cosmopolitanism, against the backdrop of the current tensions regarding the Europe-building design, and of the cooptation of national identity as a card provocatively played against different kinds of minority groups, Lahiri's attention to regions enriches and problematizes a supposedly single “Italian identity” by showing that local identities, with their own traditions and languages, are real, and that Italy's national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries are quite blurred, to say the least.Lahiri defines her anthology a self-portrait but not designed to be that. Authenticated by her direct experience of Italy, this volume adds a polyphony of voices in which her transnational mind reverberates, reinforcing her idea of “home” in constant tension between domesticity and foreignness.The polyvocal, multicultural, hybrid condition that Lahiri highlights in The Penguin Books of Italian Short Stories is the existential challenge that she openly in all the she has penned in in to her in Her with Italian short stories as an editor and translator, is of the many ways in which she has a with Italy, its literature, and Italy is represented in several stories in her collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), from the that brings from for his and of previous in to the setting of the last story where the two and by chance in two and their Italy But Lahiri has international attention for her with Italy as the author of the In which her of into a new and by a new the language in which Lahiri has to several in in Italian she has also published the autobiographical Il of and the short novel translated into English by Lahiri herself as The meaning both I and I find identity and as two that in Lahiri define and the these Lahiri has extensively her with language and cultural identity, an unavoidable tension between belonging and that translation as a practice and a condition of James was at that could not in English without a to English and to in French or my which to be to the to the of own linguistic to to to the This is the that Lahiri has by to of her cultural and linguistic we could define Bengali as an from English as an through and American environments in which she and Italian as her own as she has to be by both and the from Antonio Tabucchi in In a different a language that was a of and One of the in The this third a third in her because she approaches it American or without or or of any It was to her on the two countries that could her in of that had no a recent at I Lahiri to the and in her for a new and a new in a new she that she she only from It is quite of her to this considering the of her linguistic that she herself has with her audience on numerous the to The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri this with an and the she on translation as the only while the of in linguistic is the of literature, but language also it up it to and Translation, in the is the in translation the literary the She hence the of for create national literatures with their languages, but literature is by and of George who claims that we would on at the same time Lahiri's of the to her of a new and the of many of her characters, who are by different that they as of an unavoidable in Lahiri's own who the of language is the translator in Interpreter of As a linguistic and cultural is to facilitate but is to the between his Indian and those of the American The had between him about a do not the of his own to his a chance to be by the authentic of a different culture, the in which the is transcends the of a the power of Western on the narrative of their book instead of a direct with the their and even as an to their own and Yet we find and an to to and to even among of the same language and in Lahiri's collection of stories Unaccustomed We of the and lack of of parents parents despite their experience of from parents had only for the of their for the of a time and to which the claims by the American and way of life, their to their to and to facilitate Indeed, as was between our two who like strangers to in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories we have the example of “The which us with an lack of understanding between and The it that a not her a to by his had to as to a Lahiri's collection of Italian stories a for a language able to to an about and asymmetries in interpersonal and social for in the of family, woman's that are also to Lahiri's own But what if the that Interpreter of Maladies more language to any language to all we within first of all to and then to and to into our own all that the are and The existential French to Lahiri in The of Books that does not a a is our our no The writer in the language of of who in in that those is it is only in language that the of be For her with her personal experience and her literary works, Lahiri problematizes both language and country as and of as is the of Lahiri in a She has that she does not own any language and that she is a of linguistic in The New This lack of a also explains her to about geographical For instance, in she no of as she has to in several of her The And in the of she di any not Her only seems and In so she us to the between “home” and of of both and new she in The of the I to to have a the I to and I that my hybrid identity enriches I will always between these two these two in her autobiographical from an she in to her who the of New by and country for a new for much of her she to to a where her parents or Yet it is through literary that she the meaning of by the binarism between domesticity and The contemporary writer like is and by borders without to connotes literary activity as that is, a to always new that new too, as a transition across I a my was no for story is a foreign which, in the process of writing, is and then I to my to my characters, and in order to create new I leave the to or to to is at the of what in a less to in of my to it is my to New collection of stories Unaccustomed Earth this and from its a from “The which Lahiri as her In his to The his his and his The in which was born to yet of a genealogy and of is an particularly for Lahiri's own and personal world. It connotes the as a of identity and of not simply but also these in the of foreign of Lahiri's but with a different to the For instance, the Italian translation for where but the idea of with a a The French and the the idea of foreignness and while in it all these in the experience of and in the that Lahiri in her as an The way to her cultural in The Namesake is For a is to is a of a constant a of It is an a in what had life, only to discover that the previous has by more

Silence of the protagonist who is also the narrator in Dostoevsky's short story «A Gentle Creature» is analysed as a non-verbal sign with a false referent. The aim is to stress the key elements of the protagonist's silence, which correspond to mysti cation («the construction of the subject», manipulation, theatricality).

Here, the influence of Goethe is explored through Turgenev, and through Dostoevsky, in his writings on suicide, including the short story ‘A Gentle Creature’, and through the characters Kirillov and Stavrogin in his novel Demons. The fullest analysis, however, is reserved for The Brothers Karamazov, of which this chapter attempts to give a close reading in terms of its diabolism. Drawing on Bakhtin, the chapter takes issue with many ‘traditional’ and Christian readings of this text.

Reviewed by: Poverty and Power in the Early Works of Dostoevskij, and: Furnace of Doubt. Dostoevsky and "The Brothers Karamazov", and: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions Andrew R. Durkin S. K. Somerwil-Ayrton . Poverty and Power in the Early Works of Dostoevskij. Amsterdam:Rodopi, 1988. 253 pp. pb. Hfl. 75. Arther Trace . Furnace of Doubt. Dostoevsky and "The Brothers Karamazov."Peru, Illinois:Sherwood Sugden, 1988. 178 pp. pb. $8.95. Fyodor Dostoevsky . Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Trans. David Patterson.Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 90 pp. $16.95 cloth; pb. $8.95. Two of the volumes under review are studies of Dostoevskii's works; the third is a translation of a short nonfiction work of Dostoevskii's crucial to an understanding of his complex attitude toward Western Europe. S. K. Somerwill-Ayrton's Poverty and Power in the Early Works of Dostoevskij, as its title suggest, offers a thematic analysis of most of Dostoevskii's works composed [End Page 839] before the writer's arrest in 1849 and his exile to Siberia. Its principal merit lies in its careful consideration of a number of minor works usually slighted by critics attempting an overview of Dostoevskii's long career or focusing on the later, major novels. Although such critics may discuss Poor Folk, The Double, or "White Nights" as precursors of the later works, few devote much attention to them in their own right and even fewer deal with stories like "Polzunkov" and "A Novel in Nine Letters" (an exception to this is Victor Terras' The Young Dostoevsky). Somerwil-Ayrton treats the stories as a set of experiments or a suite of variations on the themes of money, work, social control, and love, with consideration of the dynamics of oppression (tyrant-victim axis) in each work. Although the application of mis analytic grid to each work in chronological order leads to a certain amount of redundancy, it also enables Somerwil-Ayrton to isolate the constants in Dostoevskii's early work. In addition, the author provides valuable information on the literary and social context of Dostoevskii's early years, particularly socioeconomic conditions in St. Petersburg in the 1840s, a city of government clerks in which men outnumbered women and the demands of maintaining an outward appearance (uniforms) commensurate with one's bureaucratic status often led to relative impoverishment. The constraints imposed by a society that causes the individual to suffer yet provides him with his notions of his worth lead to the psychological conflicts that underlie not only the early works but all of Dostoevskii's fiction. Somerwil-Ayrton's study, although seemingly modest in its goals and claims, provides valuable insights into Dostoevskii's early period and the roots of his later materpieces. The Brothers Karamazov, the last and perhaps the greatest of those works, is the focus of Arther Trace's study. One of Dostoevskii's central notions, that belief in God and belief in immortality are inextricably linked and together guarantee man's freedom and permit ethical behavior, provides the main theme of Furnace of Doubt, which examines each of the major characters in the novel, his behavior, and theories, in light of this thesis. Trace offers some interesting observations with regard to the effects of belief and disbelief in the characters of the novel, particularly Ivan Karamazov, but the general tone of his study is that of a series of essays or lectures rather than a scholarly study. Quotations from Dostoevskii's works are all from translations rather than the Russian text (despite the recent thirty-volume Soviet Academy of Sciences edition) and transliteration of names is not normalized and at times confused. The flighty society lady in the novel is Madame Khokhlakova, not Holakhov (sic. p. 62) (k and kh represent two distinct Russian letters and phonemes). At least one name is simply wrong: the heroine of The Idiot is Nastas'ia Filippovna, not Natasha, a diminutive of the quite different name Natalia. This lack of attention to detail can also be seen in the penultimate chapter, a survey of Dostoevskii scholarship and debate over Dostoevskii in the Soviet Union. However, anyone interested in this topic can find much more detailed and judicious discussion in Vladimir Seduro...

The article examines the creative history of short stories from the Russian history of Apollon Maikov on the basis of epistolary sources and archival materials. The idea of the work emerged in the author’s mind in a discussion with Fyodor Dostoevsky: in letters of 1867–1869 they reflected on Russia’s past and future, the work on the translation of the “Tale about Igor’s Campaign,” the need to create a textbook living history, the central event of which would be the spread of Christianity in Russia. In correspondence with Maikov, Dostoevsky outlined the concept of epics as a literary genre capable of expressing the essence of Russian history and “serving to revive the self-consciousness of the Russian people” and delineated the turning points of history that determined the future of the country. Maikov conceived another version of the description of Russia’s past — a cycle of ten to twelve historical short stories “for children and the people.” He recorded the plan of the work point by point in papers dating from 1868, and outlined it to Dostoevsky in an April letter for 1869. In separate short stories, he intended to reveal the deeds of Alexander Nevsky, Metropolitans Peter and Alexy, Dmitry Donskoy, Ioann III, Ivan the Terrible, Ermak, St. Sergius of Radonezh, Peter I, Catherine II, Suvorov, the events of 1812, the Crimean War and the liberation of the peasants. The author planned to tell the reader about the main events of Russian history and the patriots of Russia, to reveal the supreme destiny of its historical path, the prerequisites for the formation of the Russian national character, to highlight the idea of unity and integrity of all Russian territories. To realize the idea, Maikov processed chronicle legends, epics, folklore sources (for example, anecdotes about Peter I), the works of historians (I. D. Belyaev, K. P. Pobedonostsev, etc.). He thought out the plots in detail, worked through them repeatedly (which is confirmed by the preserved cycle plans for 1868 and 1881), but released from print only two short stories in 1869 (the second story includes four separate plots). Neither Dostoevsky nor Maikov succeeded in carrying out their plans for historical works. But their plans testify to a common understanding of the historical path of Russia — the path of preserving the Orthodox Christian truth in the struggle for identity and independence. Conscious of their moral duty to the fatherland, they considered it their duty to convey to readers the need to feel Russian and the right to be proud of the history of this great country.

All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill has rightfully earned a place of distinction in the history of the theory and practice of politics for championing the cause of women's emancipation. During his life, he became the object of ridicule and derision both for his theoretical work and for his political activities to promote women's freedom, although his famous work The Subjection of Women (1868) was well-received among several of his progressive colleagues and circulated widely among women's advocacy groups. As the “woman question” made progress in the twentieth century, Mill's reputation as one of its earliest supporters improved. Yet as a rule, throughout a significant portion of the twentieth century, Mill scholars persisted in the belief that one can understand Mill's moral and political thought without having to read, let alone reflect on, his views on the relations between women and men in political, social, and domestic life. This general attitude has lingered despite Mill's unequivocal insistence that women's wide-ranging subjection to men is a deeply problematic “isolated fact” in modern institutional and social life that demands serious theoretical scrutiny ( The Subjection of Women, CW XXI: 275, 294).

MLR, 99.2, 2004 473 revealing the fitness of this judgement. The decent family man, loyal public servant, modest poet, and trenchant cultural critic who emerges from this six-volume edition is testimony to some ofthe very best qualities associated with the term Victorian. The complete Letters will prove an invaluable resource not only for scholars of Arnold, but for any reader interested in the minutiae of Victorian domestic and public life. University of Nottingham Josephine M. Guy Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. By Donatella Izzo. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 2001. viii + 3i2pp. ?45-95- ISBN 0-8032-2503-2. Portraying the Lady is a formidable study of Henry James's short stories and one of the best explorations of his work to appear in recent years. Among the book's felicities are its meticulous organization, a dense, informed, and entirely useful distillation of relevant secondary material (some of it anchored in highly significant work on James inaccessible to non-Italian readers), and wholly convincing interpretations that manage to balance the coherent propositions of an incremental thesis against a sense of the contingent and negotiable. Its one disability arises from an unwillingness to confront and excavate to any extent a historical framework forits analysis. With its renovations of Foucault and (for once) subtle and critical applications of Lacan, this is also a major intervention in gender and narrative theory. Izzo cuts narrow and deep: thirteen of the 112 tales come under scrutiny,and with the exception of 'The Beast in the Jungle', and possibly 'The Last of the Valerii', most are unlikely to be known to any extent other than to the specialist. Every page of this analysis, however, would propel the reader not only to the stories it nominates, but to others in the corpus. Keenly symmetrical, the book has two parts ('The Gaze: The Manifold Arts of Re-vision' and 'The Voice: Discourses of Silence'), each consisting of two sections ('Confrontations' and 'Substitutions'; 'The Regime of Confession' and 'The Regime of Secrecy'). Izzo contends that these tales result in 'a conceptual outlookcomparable to the achievement of present-day feminist theory and gender studies' (p. 2), but the apparent narrative of the book is that this is only progressively so. Although the ar? gument is that 'representing women's subjection to patriarchal power and discipline [. . .] does not necessarily imply defendingthat power and discipline' (p. 29), the tra? jectory plotted by Izzo involves a movement from the 'exhibition of representation' (p. 2) in the firstpart of the book, through the ambivalent uses of 'confession', both entrapping and constituting women as subjects, in the second, to a concluding codicil in which Mora Maltravers can simply say 'I want to be free', and 'right afterward, with a few other words she exits the stage to seat herself in the rising balloon' (p. 258). In what appears to be an unintended consequence of this shift,however, earlier, and rather dense, anxieties about being confined to the mimetic and enthralled by James's mastery ofthe 'character-effect' (p. 17), together with a vigilant pursuit of all forms of 'denaturalisation', dissipate as Izzo relaxes into telling us that this assertion of freedom is made by 'a woman herself [. . .] in her own voice' (p. 258). This late move weakens the edifice of Izzo's argument in that 'short stories' were originally chosen as an object of investigation precisely because it is easier in that genre 'to isolate from the mimetic simulation of identitythose traits which constitute subjectivity' (p. 18). If chronology comes, then narratives ofone kind or another can never be farbehind; and where there is narrative, there is also a historical imperative. Mora Maltravers, though, is a long way from Seneca Fails, and as detached from history as her balloon from the ground. Mora is 'definitely a mistress of her own destiny' (p. 253); and instead of the ambiguous power of simply remaining silent projected in 'The Story 474 Reviews in It', 'desire [. . .] finds open expression in this story,forthe firstand only time in the corpus examined in this book' (p. 257). In 'Daisy Miller', 'the matrix story about the representation of women', the...

Among all Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Ling Shuhua (1900–1990) is probably one of the most frequently anthologized. However, due to a marginalization of modern Chinese women writers in the study of Chinese literature, up to now scholars have not paid sufficient attention to her writings. Aggravating the difficulty of producing a comprehensive assessment of her writing career is Ling’s use of both Chinese and English in her writings, her low-profile and peripatetic lifestyle, and the antileftist political stand of her husband, Chen Yuan (1896–1970), who wrote under the pen name Xiying. Though recent years have witnessed the republication of many of her works in China, in particular her short stories, few scholars have paid attention to her 1953 English memoirs Ancient Melodies (published under the name Su Hua Ling Chen). In fact, these memoirs did not appear in China and in Chinese until 1994 when the Overseas Chinese Press in Beijing published them. It is sad and ironic that decades after she disappeared from China’s literary scene, she had to rely on her identity as an overseas Chinese to secure the publication of her memoirs in her homeland. In the English-speaking world, the past two decades have seen only a few English studies on Ling Shuhua. These include Rey Chow’s 1988 essay “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua” and half of a chapter in Shu-mei Shih’s 2001 monograph The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Chow’s essay is inspiring in that it provides us with a new way of looking at modern Chinese women writers and their very act of writing. At the outset of her essay, Chow attacks commonly adopted criteria for evaluating