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Dostoevsky's works are deeply embedded in Russian cultural traditions. This study compares and analyzes the treatment of Russian cultural elements in the first translation by Geng Jizhi and the retranslation by contemporary translator Rong Rude in The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Drawing on Wills' text-to-text reception theory, the paper explores how the Russian cultural elements in the original works are rewritten and reception. Through a comparative analysis of the cultural elements in both the first translation and the retranslation, this study also tests the retranslation hypothesis, which claims that the first translation is more focused on adapting to the target culture, while the retranslation is closer to the source text. The findings show that the first translation alters religious and cultural elements to varying degrees, with the preface emphasizing the humanitarian spirit of the work, while paying relatively less attention to the value of religious philosophical ideas. In contrast, Rong Rude's new-century retranslation is more faithful to the source text and provides detailed annotations on Russian cultural elements. The preface of the retranslation places greater emphasis on the multiple interpretations of the work, striving to restore the text's various values, though the author's religious ideals are still subjected to cultural filtering. Therefore, the retranslation hypothesis is partially valid in terms of cultural reception in this case.

Existing research on the reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works in China primarily focuses on the academic reception history, with limited attention paid to ordinary readers on the internet. This study employs the qualitative analysis software NVivo 12 to analyze comments from ordinary readers on Douban. By integrating Stanley Fish's reader-response criticism and Stuart Hall's reception theory, the study identifies three distinct reader reception models and analyzes their influencing factors. Faithful fans, influenced by the Russian classical literature horizon of expectations, offer highly positive evaluations. Rational evaluators exhibit a complex attitude of both criticism and appreciation, driven by their rational stance and cultural aesthetic differences. Critics, encounter frustration in their expectations due to conflicts between their local aesthetic perspectives and the works. This study broadens the scope of audience in the reception research of Dostoevsky's works in China, revealing the diversity and complexity of ordinary readers' reception, and provides important insights for cross-cultural reader studies.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is often hailed as the undisputed champion of “the insulted and the injured” much like Milton’s Satan. His world is one of crime and punishment, guilt and expiation, God and the Devil. Dostoevsky is intriguing not because he sides with the devil or god, but because he shows the devil in god and god in the devil. Hence, Dmitri Karamazov who is immersed in debauchery is the one who is wronged, guiltless, guileless, is the one before whom the pious saintly priest Zossima reverentially and symbolically prostrated and it is the vile Svidrigailoff who is capable of conquering an idea he always feared, as Raskolnikov broods, “Was the desire to live so difficult to conquer? Did Svidrigailoff, who feared death, surmount it?” (427). The dominant emotion in his novels is guilt and it is on the edifice of guilt that Dostoevsky constructs his aesthetics. This paper proposes that Guilt becomes a liminal, interstitial space in Dostoevsky’s aesthetics allowing for the development of both, the emotion as well as the artistry, giving his novels their unique essence. This paper will primarily concentrate on Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in tracing the formation and consequences of this “third space” which “enables other positions [perspectives] to emerge,” as Homi Bhabha explicates in his interview with Jonathan Rutherford (211).

The article analyzes the attitude of Fyodor Dostoevsky toward the Roman Catholic Church. The author shows how Dostoevsky comes to the Slavophile idea of unity and the impossibility of salvation outside church communion, while speaking of the Church as an ecclesia, that is, an assembly of believers. At the same time, the reception of Dostoevsky from the side of the Vatican is presented. In the article, special attention is paid to the perception of Dostoevsky’s ideas by Pope Francis. The author notes that the point of attraction and repulsion between Dostoevsky and Catholic culture lies in the plane of his understanding of the concepts of nationality and universality. Dostoevsky’s Russian idea and his view on the essence of Christianity grows from the synthesis of these concepts. The author emphasizes that only in this perspective it is necessary to interpret Dostoevsky’s ideas.

[...]in one of his shorter works, \"Cornsilk,\" Kenan engages in an open conversation with a certain European literary antecedent - Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) - while simultaneously acknowledging and embracing the African American literary tradition from which the story arose. When a centennial anniversary edition of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois was published by Signet Classics in 1995, an introduction by Randall Kenan was included.2 In hindsight, the selection of this introductory material makes perfect sense, because Kenan was able to write an essay that demonstrates a deep appreciation for and scholarly engagement with Du Bois s text. Included in Kenans collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992) and published separately in the winter 1992 edition of BOMB, \"Cornsilk\" is a confessional monologue wherein we hear the life story of a man who had a two-year, sexual relationship with his half-sister, and his admission that memories of the smell and taste of her menstrual blood are still central to his erotic arousal.4 Perhaps the subject matter has contributed to the critical silence about this story and suppressed scholarly engagement with it, but there is a long tradition in Western culture of exploring the taboo of incest - Sophocles, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and Toni Morrison being just a few examples. Surprisingly, an obscure, relatively unknown text, an essay by Carson McCullers, posits a comparison between Russian literature and Southern Gothic writing, and this notion can function as a starting point in tracking the antecedents to Kenan's story.

In drafts, correspondence, and diaries from the mid-1870s, Fedor Dostoevskii makes repeated allusions to Fedor Tiutchev's paradoxical articulation of the inefficacy of the word in “Silentium!” but removes them from the printed versions of his texts. The only exception is Brothers Karamazov, where Dmitrii reproduces garbled fragments of the poem under interrogation and in commenting on Ivan's silence-like speech. I use these “traces” of “Silentium!” to shed light on Dostoevskii's conscious experimentation with authorial silence in novels conventionally understood in terms of the polyphonic proliferation of speech. Beginning with Mikhail Bakhtin's own allusion to “Silentium!” in the unpublished Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, the theorist came to emphasize the role of silence in polyphony. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's acknowledgement of the affinity between negative theology and the negative path to affirmation taken in deconstruction, I show how Bakhtin comes to conceive of the history of the novel as the gradual development of apophatic strategies for approximating the unspoken interior world of the other in writing.

Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be analyzed using logical truth tables to demonstrate that, however thorough the underground man's argument may appear, it does not consider the counterexample of selfless altruism. This omission prepares the way for the underground man's rejection of Liza at the climax of the second part of the novel. Sōseki's novel, too, contains a confession, namely Sensei's testament, in which Sensei relates how he arrived at his belief that humanity is fundamentally selfish. Sensei's style of reasoning is primarily inductive, in contrast with that of other characters in Sōseki's novel, and the present article argues that Sensei's style of reasoning is a primary cause of his suicide. In each novel, then, there is a sustained consideration of how and to what extent a style of reasoning is bound up with a character's fate.

Reading Fyodor Dostoevsky across the Sea of Marmara, Ottoman-Armenian author, Hagop Oshagan (1883–1948), discovered an unprecedented possibility for conceptualizing and representing non-Muslim Ottoman reality. The following discussion presents this possibility as a case of metacommunal pluralism; a pluralism not based on communally differentiated orthodoxies of ethno-national, linguistic, or confessional singularity, but rather, consisting of heterodoxical pluralities. Oshagan deviates from conventional interpretations, both positive and negative, of Ottoman pluralism as a system of communal differentiation comprised of discrete ethno-confessional units. The Dostoevskyan aspects of Oshagan's writing suggest, instead, an “underground” of extensive intersectionality that casts the truth of such conventional interpretations of Ottoman communality into doubt, showing the porousness, tensions, limits, and contradictions endemic to Ottoman minority existence.