Dostoevsky and the late twentieth century: An examination of "the ugly" (bezobraznoe).
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 212
Description: In exploring the complexities of human psychology, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevskii demonstrates how the ugly and the beautiful intertwine, and shows us the ugly in all its multiplicity. To be precise, the quality in question is that referred to by the term bezobraznoe  (formed from the prefix bez- 'without' and the root obraz 'image'). This word has specific connotations lacking in the more neutral equivalent for the English 'ugly'---nekrasivyi  (lit. 'unbeautiful'). In Dostoevskii, in particular,  bezobraznoe is related to the wicked, disgraceful, and (bearing in mind the etymology of the Russian term) the deformed. It received a particular emphasis in Dostoevskii's works, beginning in 1864, when he published "A Theory of Ugliness" by N.I. Solovev in his journal Epokha as well as his own Notes from Underground. Multiplicity, chaos, and disintegration as characteristics of the ugly are also immediate constituents of the twentieth-century Russian context. Russian writers of the late twentieth century (Iurii Mamleev, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and Tatiana Tolstaia) take in new directions Dostoevskii's ideas about the ugly and employ his poetics of ugliness in their works, which associate bezobraznoe  with the 'formlessness' of the Russian people and their existential disorder.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3670.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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