Gentle Creature Research Articles

Pandas Galore

Panda bears top many peoples' lists of favorite animals. Fascination with these playful, gentle creatures often leads to viral news stories. Students are likely to enjoy these engaging problems, covering a wide range of mathematics topics.

Любовь, заблокированная гордыней: об иллюзорности «системы» и механизме смерти в рассказе «Кроткая» Ф.М. Достоевского

Любовь, заблокированная гордыней: об иллюзорности «системы» и механизме смерти в рассказе «Кроткая» Ф.М. Достоевского

Morte e narrativa

Resumo Há um pequeno relato de morte escrito por Fiódor Dostoievski em 1876, inspirado em notícias de jornal, em que o esforço narrativo se volta para cobrir de sentido a falta de sentido original do morrer. Intitulado A dócil, esse texto é aqui retomado para pensar sobre alguns dos caminhos que tomam o jornalismo e seus relatos ao ingressarem na teia de referências associadas à morte em nossa cultura.

King Kong in the Mist

In the twentieth century, two key texts about the »greatest of the great apes«, the gorilla, shaped our perception of other primates. At the first glance, they could not be more different.While one represents a fictive struggle with an aggressive monster (King Kong, 1932), the other is the memoir of a scientist who researches and protects gentle creatures (Gorillas in the Mist, 1983). When read as travel narratives, however, both reveal surprising similarities. Starting with a journey to a remote, unknown place, they describe the humans’ conflicting emotions during their encounter with animals. Both books deal with the recognition that we share cognitive and affective traits with the bestial ›other‹. The article compares the presentation of gorillas in these different and yet similar texts from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and primatology. It explores the role of emotions in inter-species interaction and in the process of knowledge production in the field.

(En)countering Inclusion. Repeating: Refrain

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 7.2 (2015) Once upon a time, in a northern land both white and great, there lived a dusky, raven-haired girl—although, by the time of this telling, she was hardly a girl any longer. Nevertheless, because she was brown and small, it remained easier to think of her as such. Besides, she read children’s books a lot. Thus, she was smiled on fondly as but a little, delicate, gentle creature with surely only the prettiest words for everyone falling from her lips. Now, it so happened that, in the country where she lived, many of her compatriots, who were, together, all the colours of the rainbow, had worked long and industriously to weave a rich and comforting tapestry of inclusivity large enough to cloak the entire land. Meant to beautify not just the place but the people as well, this warm and fuzzy fabric threaded together all the colours and stripes in which we all come and just melted the hearts of everyone upon whom it came to be draped. The showy mesh was much celebrated, for the country had previously been most horribly and oppressively bland.

IMAGES (HOLY AND OTHERWISE): DOSTOEVSKIAN SUBTEXTS IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN CINEMA

This article focuses on the heroines of two recent Russian films: Natalia in Vera Storozheva'ʹs Traveling with Pets ( Путешествие с домашними животными ) (2007) and the title character of Andrei Zviagintsev'ʹs Elena ( Елена ) (2011). Both characters bear striking resemblances to figures from Dostoevsky’s works, among them “A Gentle Creature” (“Кроткая”) and The Brothers Karamazov . By analyzing the echoes of Dostoevskian imagery, character development, and themes in these two films, I investigate how contemporary Russian filmmakers respond to and diverge from significant cultural references and tropes. One particularly fruitful line of inquiry involves the shared imagery of religious icons. Holy images abound in Dostoevsky’s fictional universe, especially the icon of the Mother of God. For instance, the title character of “A Gentle Creature” holds an icon in her hands while committing suicide, an ambiguous act encompassing both despair and spiritual liberation. While Natalia in Traveling with Pets is a true innocent, she experiences guilt for the “sin” of not loving her husband. The priest she consults gives her an icon of the Mother of God. Unlike Dostoevsky’s character, however, Natalia does not succumb to despair. Instead, she experiments with various forms of liberation from her oppressive past, settling finally on modeling herself after the image of the Mother of God. Natalia adopts a boy from the orphanage she herself was raised in, and we last see her dressed in blue (the color associated with the virgin Mary), gazing at her new son with adoration. Elena also seeks guidance from the church after her husband has a heart attack, and she is told to place candles at the icons of the Mother of God and St. Nikolai. However, her attempts to find solace in the church fail. Although she seems to possess genuine affection for her husband, Elena’s strongest emotional attachment remains to her son and grandchildren. Indeed, her dedication to motherhood leads her to commit murder. Natalia may be seen as an alternative version of the gentle creature who survives and thrives, achieving personal independence and emotional transformation, but Elena represents an entirely different and darker path. While the gentle creature comes close to murdering her husband, in the “duel” scene, Elena shows us another variation of the storyline: she does murder her wealthy husband in order to save her son from poverty and her grandson from the army. While Natalia represents a triumphant version of the gentle creature whose maternal instinct saves and transforms her, Elena becomes an even more tragic figure than Dostoevsky’s heroine.

Fiction into Film: Bresson's Une Femme douce and Its Russian Source

Robert Bresson attained his power through his method, which is less a thing literally to be described or expressed than an inner orientation enabling an outward quest. That quest, in Bresson's case, was to honor God's universe by using film to render the reality of that universe, and, through its reality, both the miracle of its creation and the mystery of its being. In this essay the author reconsiders Bresson's 1969 film Une Femme douce (A Gentle Creature), after the 1876 novella by Dostoyevsky, from the perspective of its spiritual style, which is consonant with the film's very adaptation method.

Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita (review)

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita Pekka Tammi Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment, eds. Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 190 pp. Five decades after its publication in the United States, say the editors of this new guide to Nabokov’s Lolita, the book “continues to produce outcries” (Preface). This is generally a healthy sign, securing the novel a foothold in the contested curricula of today’s literature and language departments. There remains a ready market for pedagogical aids like the one at hand. With its twenty-two original essays displaying variable — variably useful — critical approaches, plus an assortment of background materials and ample suggestions for further reading, the collection is well suited to assist the teaching of Nabokov’s novel in a thousand and one classrooms around the globe.1 From the pedagogical angle, one feels that students should first of all be steered away from the more outlandish topics debated by Nabokov specialists: [End Page 221] the date conundrum (inconsequential to my mind, see 16–17); ghosts and “spirits,” which are mercifully all but neglected in the present volume (only once are we led to ask whether “Charlotte’s spirit appears to abet” Humbert’s pursuits, 91: one wonders what students will make out of that!); butterflies (see 49–54); even Eugene Onegin. That “Lolita is a parody of a free translation of Onegin” (94) — as proposed by Priscilla Meyer in her essay — may be a hypothesis well worth pondering among experts on Nabokov, especially in view of the author’s parodic manoeuvres in Pale Fire (on which Meyer herself has published much valuable research). But students wishing to make sense of Lolita should be spared, I think, at least if we wish to keep them coming to our classes. More promisingly, many of these essays set out to situate Nabokov’s novel in broader cultural contexts familiar (or sometimes less so) to students of literature today. The relevance of contemporary “consuming” culture as a backdrop in Lolita, manifested through the succession of references to shopping, advertising, imaginary brand names (“Dromes,” consumed by Quilty), is demonstrated in an essay by Tania Roy and John Whalen-Bridge (62–70). One need not wax overly ideological about such matters, however. The cultural-studies approach proves fruitful precisely because Lolita supplies its own sharp-eyed commentary on the commercialization of our lives, alarming to fastidious Humbert (but not to Dolly Haze who, one may remember, was “as glad as an ad”). Similarly, Lolita contains an inbuilt dialogue with visual media culture and cinema, as several critics have shown. The cinema angle, bound to strike a chord with students, is employed by Brian Boyd (108–114) in discussing the novel vis-à-vis its filmed (Adrian Lyne) version. Possible parallels between Lolita and pre-Soviet silent movies are taken up by Galya Diment. This is a fascinating topic in its own right, gaining relevance from Nabokov’s recourse to silent film references elsewhere in his work, as in Speak, Memory, quite expertly scrutinized by Diment in her contribution (101–107).2 Another kind of backdrop, impossible to avoid in discussing Nabokov, derives from the network of allusions to Russian literary topics. These are charted with regard to Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground and A Gentle Creature) — very usefully — by Dale E. Peterson (71–76) and by Julian W. Connolly (89–93), who also appends observations on Russian folklore motifs (i.e. rusalki, appearing throughout Nabokov’s fiction). At the same time, as pointed out by Michael Wood, Lolita should be at home in a course that studies the morbid American worlds of Poe (and Hawthorne) and the grander pathologies of Melville, but . . . Lolita is also relevant to any course in which varieties of American loneliness are explored, particularly in relation to those leaps of hope and desire that Europeans are supposedly (and sometimes actually) too tired to manage. (117) [End Page 222] As an inspirational guide to reading Lolita in the context of American literary landscapes Wood’s elegantly phrased piece strikes me as a model of its kind. Wood is also very good in tracing the recurrent “locomotive motif” (115–16...

Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 by Joseph Frank (review)

1164 Reviews that he said his last farewell to Jenny Lind, an episode retold in Mit Livs Eventyr, his autobiography. His farewell to Austria came in 1872. It brought his long experience of the German-speaking world to a muted, ironic, yettouching close which will put many a reader of Rossel's informative and well-illustrated study in mind of Thomas Mann. University of Bristol Peter Skrine Dostoevsky: The Mantle ofthe Prophet, i8ji-i88i. By Joseph Frank. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2002. xv + 784 pp. ?32.50 (pbk ?12.95). ISBN 0-691-08665-6 (pbk 0-691-11569-9). This, the fifthand final volume in Joseph Frank's definitive literary biography of Dostoevskii, begins with Dostoevskii's return to St Petersburg from abroad in July 1871, after a four-year absence, just as his third novel, The Devils, was being pub? lished. Frank deals here with Dostoevskii's fifteen-montheditorship, in 1873-74, of the magazine Grazhdanin (The Citizen), owned by the powerful and rather louche Prince Meshcherskii. He describes the history of the composition of A Raw Youth and then discusses that novel, whose relative weakness he partly attributes to the li? mitations that Dostoevskii imposed upon himself by his agreement to publish it in the journal Notes of the Father land (which by 1875, when the novel appeared, had taken on a Populist hue). Frank justifiably pays much attention to the Diary ofa Writer,the monthly newspaper that Dostoevskii produced single-handed in 1876-77, and again in 1880, and in which Dostoevskii published two of his finest short works of fiction, 'A Gentle Creature' and 'The Diary of a Ridiculous Man', as well as much searching comment on current social and political issues. Frank also devotes much space to the festivities surrounding the unveiling ofthe statue to Pushkin in Moscow in 1880 and to Dostoevskii's momentous speech on that occasion and the attendant polemics. There is material on Dostoevskii's relations with other writers during the last fewyears ofhis life, and in particular his literary enmity with Turgenev and his sense of competition with Tolstoi, whom he never met. Many of the foregoing matters also relate in some way to the composition of Dostoevskii's crowning achievement, The Brothers Karamazov , which was completed in 1880, and which Frank examines at great length before providing a moving finale on Dostoevskii's death and funeral in late January 1881. As in previous volumes in his series, Frank establishes a dense background against which to read Dostoevskii's writings. Here he is at pains to show that the 'nihilism' that had characterized radical thought in the 1860s, and against which Dostoevskii's creative energies had been pitted in that decade, gave way in the 1870s to Populism. The thinkers who promoted the latter doctrine, such as Lavrov and Mikhailovskii, were much more congenial to Dostoevskii than the nihilists had been, on account of their admiration of the Russian people, their assertion of freedom of choice and per? sonal moral responsibility over crude determinism, and the spirit of selfless service and self-sacrifice that they encouraged. On the other hand, Dostoevskii was dismayed by the rise of terrorism towards the end of the decade, following the failure of the 'going to the people' in 1874 and the authorities' harsh treatment of the peaceful propagandists. This development threatened the stability of the autocratic regime, which Dostoevskii considered so fundamental to Russian identity. It was in the con? text of political assassinations and attempts at assassination in the last three years of Dostoevskii's life?a development to which educated society responded with an ominous passivity?that The Brothers Karamazov was written. Dostoevskii reprises many of his major ideas and themes in the period that Frank surveys in this volume, and some of them now findtheir fullest expression. He deve? lops his belief that a world without God has no meaning. It is a psychological necessity, MLRy 100.4,2005 1165 he reaffirms,for the human personality to experience itself as free. The spiritual and the carnal, the sacred and the profane, are again juxtaposed. The struggle between reason and faith goes on. Socialism and Christianity, in its pure...

Full speed ahead

Evidence has been accumulating that dolphins and porpoises are not always the gentle creatures they are popularly imagined to be, and now it also appears that whales might not be gentle giants after all.

Freud: Political and Social Thought, 3rd ed.

Freud: Political and Social Thought, 3rd ed.

Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved

Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved

Marianne Moore's "Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish" and the Poetry of the Natural World

In the pages of her editor's Comment in Dial for August 1927, Marianne Moore paused to ruminate about, of all things, snakes. The usefulness, companionableness, and gentleness of she began, sometimes alluded to in print by scientists and by amateurs. to dissent from the serpent deity; and enlightenment is preferable to superstition when plagues are to be combated - army-worms, locusts, a mouse army, tree vegetable blights, diseases of cattle, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and floods. Destruction such was experienced by us in western states and in Florida the past winter, from tornadoes and from the Mississippi in the spring, could not have been more portentously afflicting more admonitory had believed ourselves to have been preyed upon by an aquatic serpent by a wind god. (Complete Prose 187) Moore's comments appear to bespeak an internal conflict. Initially, Moore approaches her subject from the pose of a rational skeptic. Needless to say, she insists, that we dissent from the serpent deity. Her emphatic phrase, Needless to say, places her firmly on the side of the enlightened scientists who prefer to rely on technology rather than superstitious ceremony to solve the pesky problems - locusts, mice, and vegetable blights - that nature doles out. No sooner has Moore uttered her preference for enlightenment, however, than she invokes images of the destructive powers of nature that extend well beyond the reach control of technological know-how: earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes. Such natural disasters, Moore states, are usefully admonitory. Even though rational science insists that nature is not a collection of powerful gods, floods and tornadoes warn us to check our arrogant assumption that nature, however void of vengeful spirits, is comfortably controllable. Qualifying her own scientific pose, Moore turns back to the serpent and professes her admiration for those less-skeptical cultures that once viewed nature with reverence, wonder, and a healthy dose of dread. A certain ritual of awe - animistic and animalistic - need not, however, be effaced from our literary consciousness. serpent a motive in art, an idea, beauty, is surely not beneath us, see it . . . in the turtle zoomorphs, feathered serpent columns, and coiled rattlesnakes of Yucatan; in the silver-white snakes, chameleon lizards, and stone dragons of Northern Siam. Guarding the temple of Cha-Heng in Nan, the hundred yard pair of blue-green-yellow painted monsters - with reared head and flowing, skin-like rise of body - are, one infers from Reginald le May's description and partial photograph, majestic worms. Nor does the mythologic war between serpent and elephant seem disproportionate when one examines a stone dragon which guards rice fields in Northern Siam from raiding herds of elephants. As Edward Topsell has said in his Historie of Serpents, Among all the kinds of serpents there is none comparable to the Dragon, and the fact of variants seemed to Aldrovanus, no detraction. Dragons there are in Ethiopia ten fathoms long and there are little ones. In an old letter to the public read: Thirty miles from London, this present month of August, 1614 - and the news is attested by men and by a Widow Woman dwelling near Faygate - there lives a serpent or dragon some call it, reputed to be nine feet, rather more, in length. It is likewise discovered to have large feet, but the eye may be there deceived and two great bunches as some think will in time grow to wings; but God, I hope, will defend the poor people in the neighborhood, that he shall be destroyed before he grow so fledged. Farewell. By A. R. He that would send better news, if he had it. (187-88) Engaging the mythology of the serpent, Moore's thoughts move from the companionable snake to the mysterious dragon, from a gentle creature to a fierce myth, from an image of nature's utility to an implication of nature's might, from the rational present to the imaginative past. …

Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and "The Gentle Creature"

Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and "The Gentle Creature"

From the Editor

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...

Telling silence: Russian frame narratives of renunciation

Isenberg discusses frame narrative and its relation to genre in one set of Russian short classics on the theme of erotic renunciation. Drawing on rich critical tradition and on contemporary work in narratology, Isenberg analyzes Turgenev's First Love, Dostoevsky's gentle Creature, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, and works by Chekhov, Kharms, and Makanin to provide new insight into the frame narrative of passion.

Religious supplicant, seductive cannibal, or reflex machine? In search of the praying mantis

Religious supplicant, seductive cannibal, or reflex machine? In search of the praying mantis

On the Uses of the Motif of the Duel in Dostoevskii's " A Gentle Creature "

On the Uses of the Motif of the Duel in Dostoevskii's " A Gentle Creature "

The Problem of Highland Discontent, 1880–1885

After the rising of 1745 the Highlands were rapidly tamed: within quite a short period the young men who in a past generation would have rallied to the support of their chiefs in domestic disputes, were gradually drawn off to fight in foreign wars, to settle in the colonies, or to help govern India. By the time of the great Sutherland clearances of 1807–20 the Highlands had been so far pacified that scarcely a hand was raised against the destruction of much-loved homes. Gradually the impression got abroad that the descendants of Rob Roy were gentle creatures, a bit rough perhaps in their habits, but easily domesticated and loyal to the powers that be in church and state. And this impression seemed to be confirmed by Queen Victoria's experiences at Balmoral, and by the friendly reception given to the wealthy tourists whom the works of Sir Walter Scott lured to the Highlands.

The fight to save Uganda’s White Rhino

In the West Nile District of Uganda lives a population of white rhino—those relies of a past age, cumbrous, gentle creatures despite their huge bulk—which estimates only 10 years ago, put at 500. But poachers live in the area, too, and official counts showed that white rhino were being reduced alarmingly. By 1959, they were believed to be diminished to 300.