Havoc and Healing
Insights into Human Action in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
NB, THE CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO OCTOBER 12–13, 2020
(Conference at Uppsala University, March 26–27, 2020)
Venue
Uppsala University, English Park Campus
Theme
In the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, human action is frequently destructive, leading collectively to war and individually to murder or other forms of social and familial disruption. Concomitantly these authors offer some of the most incisive psychosocial insights available in cultural discourse into the motivations and dynamics of such behavior. Focussing on Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, this conference will examine the full complexity of these insights, explicit in philosophical statements and implicit in the embodied human experience of the fictional characters. This includes:
- Depictions of war, crime and injustice
- Depictions of family, domestic happiness and discord
- Existential questions such as free will and the existence of God
- The relation of these questions to such formal aspects as narratorial and textual structures and the question of “polyphony”
The conference is organized by Julie Hansen, Dept. of Modern Languages, and Torsten Pettersson, Dept. of Literature, and generously funded by the Dept. of Modern Languages