Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky

✍ Scribed by René Girard, James G. Williams

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 119
• Series: Studies in Violence, Mimesis, & Culture
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In a fascinating analysis of critical themes in Feodor Dostoevsky’s work, René Girard explores the implications of the Russian author’s “underground,” a site of isolation, alienation, and resentment. Brilliantly translated, this book is a testament to Girard’s remarkable engagement with Dostoevsky’s work, through which he discusses numerous aspects of the human condition, including desire, which Girard argues is “triangular” or “mimetic”—copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our own. Girard’s interdisciplinary approach allows him to shed new light on religion, spirituality, and redemption in Dostoevsky’s writing, culminating in a revelatory discussion of the author’s spiritual understanding and personal integration. Resurrection is an essential and thought-provoking companion to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

✦ Table of Contents

vii Foreword: René Girard since 1996
James G. Williams
xiii Foreword: René Girard
James G. Williams
xix A Biographical Prologue
James G. Williams
xxv Chronology of Feodor Dostoevsky
Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky
3 Chapter 1. Descent into the Inferno
13 Chapter 2. Underground Psychology
29 Chapter 3. Underground Metaphysics
51 Chapter 4. Resurrection
75 Postface: Mimetic Desire in the Underground
91 Notes
93 Books by René Girard