leonarde

Posted by Koy: I'm glad Koy got such great forensic training; otherwise he would be forced to
stoop to vulgarity!!

leonarde

Je dois dire, ma Kat, que notre ami, Koy, a dit dans un autre thread qu'il etait un expert de "Fauteuil" de la literature de Dostoevsky: il a lu tous les oevres de Dostoevsky cinq fois!!!! C'est vrai, cinq fois! Et qu'est-ce qu'il pense de cet ecrivain russe??? Dostoevsky etait un athee! C'est
vrai, un athee! Peut etre notre Koy est le Humo(u)riste de II!! Le Humo(u)riste malgre lui!!!
C'est une theorie nouvelle!!! Dostoevsky, mon vieux ami, tu es meconnaissable!!!! Tout le monde
dans ses yeux est meconnaissable.........

leonarde

Posted by Koy: "Et ma volonte est un resultat d'une tete vide"
---Koy (quote invented by leonarde)

Cheers!

Koyaanisqatsi

Well, there you have it folks.

His fourth deliberate and obvious evasion from the most basic requirement of evidentiary procedures: quote your sources directly so that everyone can evaluate the evidence for him or herself.

You have therefore conceded the entire debate in that one post proving in the process your lack of scholastic integrity.

You have been demonstrated to be nothing more than a dishonest propagandist.

This ends my thread as far as I'm concerned.

Feel free to do as much damage control as you think you're capable, leonarde, by posting as many irrelevant follow-ups here as you like.

It won't change a thing.

Ciao.

And yes, Dostoevsky was indeed an atheist, IMO, but then it's not surprising you'd try to pretend otherwise or even be incapable of correctly interpreting his works.

It's clearly your worst defect.

[ May 07, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>

katerina

Chuckle. That certainly would be an interesting and unusual take on Dostoevsky, Koyaanisqatsi.

AFAIK, What Lennie doesn't know about science he can make up for in sovietology and Russian language and literature which, come to think of it, I believe he has taught at the university level.

But I like Nabokov over Dostoevsky any day. Drasted hysterical females! Blech!

leonarde

Okay, Dostoevsky's two most well-known works (full
blown novels)were "Crime and Punishment" and "The
Brothers Karamazov" the latter being the very last
thing he wrote before dying and being his great statement about the world.

"Crime and Punishment": an impoverished student named Raskolnikov develops a theory (which smacks
of Nietsche)that the human race is divided into ordinary people (who are doomed to obey the rules)
and supermen (like Napoleon) who have the right to
spill blood to "say a new word" in human history.
Raskolnikov convinces himself he belongs among the
"supermen" and kills an old pawnbroker woman, and
reluctantly, her sister. Raskolnikov meets a prostitute with a heart of gold named Sonia who
reads the Bible to him. Ultimately he confesses to
Sonia and she insists he give himself in to the police. An odd religious fervor triumphs over all
and quite explicitly for any reader to make out.

"The Brothers Karamazov": even MORE explicitly religious. The hero is Alyosha, a novice at a monastery. His father is a lecherous clown who
has produced a bastard son who, we learn later,
kills his father. Alyosha's two brothers are:

1)Dmitri, the earthy but faithful older brother who drinks too much.

2)Ivan, whose atheism is coupled with a nihilism
which takes him to the brink of madness.

Alyosha's hero is the elder Zossima in the monastery. The novel is as pro-Russian Orthodoxy
as could possibly be. No one who ever read such a
novel and remembered it in even a GENERAL way could mistake it for the work of an atheist. When
I read Koy's claim in these pages that Dostoevsky
was an atheist and that Koy had read EACH work of
his FIVE times(!!!!!!) I was......astonished.

But since Koy is so resolutely and vehemently wrong about almost everything I'm glad he thinks
the Shroud is inauthentic......

leonarde

There shall probably be plenty of time for other
citations, interlocutors etc. but I would like to
take an example of Koy's "deductive logic" (even
more "deadly" than the "critical analysis" he kept
on blathering about in the prior Shroud thread).
Observe: Leonarde again: Notice the false dichotomy: "telling the truth or lying". If a bunch of ancient Jews pick up some rocks to stone
someone, that is NOT capital punishment or juridical homicide: it is the equivalent of a lynching. That Koy cannot make this intellectual
distinction is par for the course with him. As to
the Prophets, of COURSE, most of them lived before
30 AD which was the approximate year in which the
right to execute LEGALLY was taken from the Jews by the Romans.
Koy's posts, both here and in the prior Shroud thread are full of such mixups, nonsequiturs, and
loopy logic which HE calls "deductive".
Cheers!

katerina

Len, will you check your pm's on this board please? Thanks.

Koyaanisqatsi

Give it up, leonarde. We're done. You lost. Truth won.

Only to someone incapable of applying unbiased critical analysis, Kat .

Not that I want to further fuel leonarde's evasions, but since this "debate" is decidedly over and leonarde shown for the dishonest propagandist he is, I'll say this regarding Dostoevsky (and authors in general): don't mistake what their characters say or do necessarily for what the author thinks.

My first play was a restructuring of Adam & Eve in modern times that displays a decidedly christian theological conceit, but that doesn't make me a christian.

D.'s central characters are always struggling with extremes and are placed directly into the heart (and soul) of Russian moors and as such naturally struggle with what concerned the Russian ethos in direct proportion to what inflicted the Russian pathos (to use the dime store cliché’s of my college days) as D. saw it, true, but deconstructing D. (great name for a band), IMO, must be done on far more complex levels than just what his characters do or say; the man was an unjustly exiled political prisoner first and foremost.

There are no atheist's in foxholes? Well, explain to me how you could possibly be standing in Simonovsky Square facing a noose, have your sentence commuted to Omsk and then write something like Memoirs or The Brother's K.?

Alyosha's struggle with empty, unsupportable hope in the face of constant, stark reality is an indictment of mysticism and the irrational desperation it inflicts, not an endorsement! Why else would Ivan tell him the poem of the Grand Inquisitor, where the realities of deism are laid bare to the deity?

What a shock that a deist like leonarde would misinterpret this.

As for Crime, when Sonia tells Raskolnikov, "We must suffer and suffer together" and pray for atonement in prison, D. is equating prayer (as well as love) with imprisonment and atonement with suffering, again as an indictment on both the irrational human mind and the society that conditions the irrational human mind.

It's self imposed as a result of societal coditioning; the pathos of the Russian mind set, which as even leonarde knows was rife with mysticism and superstition in D.'s day (I like that one too ), but more importantly increasingly molded by the oppression and disparity between the rulers and the ruled.

What do you think Porphyre represents if not literally the state; if not society's relentless cat and mouse game forcing a petty, quasi-criminal like Raskolnikov to eventually break down and actually view self-imposed imprisonment as the only means to achieve salvation?

The hell of it (the crime and the punishment) comes from the very fact that Raskolnikov is under the impression that he is in control by willfully choosing imprisonment; by mistakenly thinking that he has beaten Porphyre/Society/the State and "love," by turning a hell into a heaven, thus proving that the mind can be so easily conditioned to actually think that suffering is salvation (sound familiar you christians and free will fallacy freaks out there?).

It is perverse in its deconstruction (as all of his pieces were), but most importantly, it is hidden so deeply into his subtext (like an innocent political prisoner unjustly exiled to Siberia who nonetheless must still survive in the pack) that his work is both rooted in time and place as it is equally untethered to any one nationality or century.

IMO, he birthed Orwell.

Again, this isn't the place, but if you want to get into it with me, start a thread and we'll go. Leonarde, however, is not invited.

He has proved himself incapable of honest scholarship repeatedly here, so there is no reason at all to assume he would be capable of avoiding the same preconceived biases in regard to D.'s atheism (or, perhaps better, as I contend, his anti-theism) elsewhere.

That and $3 gets you terrible coffee at Starbucks. What lennie doesn't know about honest scholarship and the application of critical analysis has already filled more bandwidth here than anybody else I can think of, with the possible exception of course of Nomad and Metacrock (though for shear transparent obfuscation, my vote goes to lennie).

Apples and oranges. Well, actually, Borscht and Blintzes .

leonarde

Can Koy name a SINGLE scholar of Dostoevsky, Russian literature, or ANY related field who believes that Dostoevsky was an atheist? For I suffer from having read voraciously not only Dostoevsky's works but several full-length biographies of Dostoevsky and ALL of the biographers say that Dostoevsky was a Russian Orthodox Christian of a mystical bent (he was particularly attached to the Virgin Mary as I recall).
If Koy alone understands Dostoevsky in a way that
no Russian, no literature professor, no literary
critic, no biographer of Dostoevsky ever did then
there are only 2 conclusions:

1)Koy is a genius for the ages.

2)Koy sees only what he wants to see.

I'll let discerning readers make up their own minds.....
Cheers!