| With the serialized publication of Demons in 1871--1872, Fedor Dostoevsky not only created a sensation on the Russian political scene, but also firmly established terrorism as a new theme in the Russian literary tradition. He achieved these goals not by arranging historical events in a literary format, but by becoming a theorist of terrorism in his novel. One of Dostoevsky's insights into the dynamic of terrorism is his understanding that there are two sides of terrorism---the destructive and the creative. The destructive side involves real acts of violence and terror. The creative one marks terrorism's heavy dependence on rhetoric to achieve success and power in society. In fact, one could go so far as to argue that the very act of terrorism becomes in part a rhetorical act.;The general purpose of this study is threefold: (1) it provides a detailed examination and analysis of Dostoevsky's paradigm for the literary representation of terrorism; (2) it discusses carefully Dostoevsky's insights into the dynamic of terrorism, especially its creative side; and (3) it explores the way in which Dostoevsky's paradigm continued to persist and develop in the Russian literary imagination from the publication of Demons in 1871--72 to the October Revolution of 1917. More specifically, Chapters One through Three are devoted to the types of terrorists identified by Dostoevsky: the romantic image of the terrorist---Nikolai Stavrogin; the criminal terrorist---Petr Verkhovensky; and the utopian terrorist---Ivan Shatov and Aleksei Kirillov. Chapter Four takes a slightly different approach and discusses the topic of women who love terrorists---Lizaveta Tushina (Liza), Iulia fon Lembke, and Dar'ia Shatova (Dasha). This approach provides the opportunity not only to address the seductive power that terrorism exerts in society, but also to consider the extent to which society participates in and may be responsible for terrorism. Each chapter ends with a concluding coda, which traces and analyzes the future development of the particular type of terrorist and major issues addressed in the chapter. In these sections, special emphasis is paid to the terrorist novels of Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Boris Savinkov, and Andrei Bely. |
