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Fwd: TT: Odoevsky, Dostoevsky, Swedenborg
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----- Forwarded message from a-nakata@courante.plala.or.jp -----
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:42:44 +0900
From: Akiko Nakata <a-nakata@courante.plala.or.jp>
Thanks to Jansy and Alexey, the thread connecting Pauline and Turgenev is
getting thicker.
As Don has mentioned before, Simon Karlinsky suggests that we should not
expect the Russian novelist in Ch. 6 to be a writer we know but consider him
an amalgam (like Koncheyev in *The Gift*) of several nineteenth-century
Russian writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Vladimir Odoevsky. All
of them have similarities to and differences from the novelist in question.
According to Karlinsky, *Faust in Moscow* would be a highly appropriate
title for Odoevsky's *Russian Nights*. I would be grateful if Alexey or
anyone would kindly tell me more about the novel. Are there parallelisms
between the novel and TT?
Russian Nights (1844)
Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1804-1869)
This captivating novel is the summation of Odoevsky's views and interests in
many fields: Gothic literature, romanticism, mysticism, the occult, social
responsibility, Westernization, utopia and anti-utopia. Compared to The
Decameron, to Hoffman's Serapion Brethren, and to the Platonic dialogues,
Russian Nights is a unique mixture of romantic and society tales framed by
Odoevsky's musings on strands of Russian thought and his own obsessions.
A thing about Dostoevsky. Recently I happened to read that Dostoevsky wrote
in *A Writer's Diary* that he took Swedenborg's psychic powers of
clairvoyance seriously. Does he write about clairvoyance or translucency in
his works?
Akiko
----- End forwarded message -----