Dostoevsky and the Woman Question
by Nina Pelikan Straus
Category: Fiction

This is the first full-length study of Dostoevsky's work to explore the relation between his male characters and his female characters from a feminist perspective. Intended not to impose feminist ideology upon the writer but rather to enlarge feminist discourse through Dostoevsky, it offers new interpretations of the novels that emphasize gender crisis. Dostoevsky's defense against Western Secularization and breakdown takes the form of inscribing "the feminine" as sacred. But this sacralization is undermined by his deeper intuition of the way certain masculine, sexist impulses exploit and eroticize female sacralization and by the way men's liberties conflict with women's liberation.