1. The two sides of the debates in Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” are who can handle freedom the most. Christ gave human beings the freedom to choose weather or not to follow him, but almost no one is strong enough to be faithful and those who are not will be cursed forever. The Grand Inquisitor says that Christ should have given people no choice, and instead taken power and given people no choice, and instead taken power and given people redemption instead of freedom. So that the same people who were to scared to succeed Christ to begin with would still be stuck, but at least they could have joy and security on earth, rather than the impossible burden of moral freedom.
A ghoul is a being of pure evil, one with no soul, a foul disgusting thing that desires to be the most horrific being it can be like Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was the Tsar of Russia from 1533 to 1584. He was a ruthless, cunning evil being who killed and brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people. The Tsar ordered people to be beheaded, strangled, hanged, blinded, burned, stabbed, boiled, disemboweled, buried alive, impaled, and fried. The Villain would often force parents to watch the execution of their children.
My favorite book from this semester has to be the Grand Inquisitor by Fyoder Dostoevsky. First off, what compelled me to pick this book was the originality of the content by having the Grand Inquisitor appear to conversate with Jesus Christ. However, more specifcally, I appreciated the main themes like the ideas that the masses are innately naïve, a majority of people would rather be told what to do rather than to follow their own logic, and people are satisfied as long as they are comfortable. The idea of the masses seeking refuge and protection over their freedom due to being unintelligent is mentioned frequently in the Grand Inquisitor.
In The Prince they talked about how a king doesn’t want to be hatred by his people but have them respect him so he can’t be to nice. So a king in this book they should be stingy, cruel, breaking promises, and having a great staff of people. Stingy would be better than being nice to your people shows them that you are the king and they need to respect you and your decision. Cruel is better than being nice also if someone takes sometime from you there has to be something done about it! Morality and ethics are not a big deal to break in The Prince breaking promises so it will benefits the king is okay to do!
Personal Reactions: I liked how Lev’s character was developed throughout the story. Lev’s main focus in the beginning of the book is to escape from his “kidnappers” and be tithed like his parents wanted, but he is so focused on obeying his parents that he doesn’t notice the people who he thinks kidnapped him are trying to save him from being unwound. As the story progresses it’s obvious Lev no longer feels the same way, this is shown on page 226 when Shusterman states, “Once he landed in the safe-house network, he quickly made it known that he was not a guy to be trifled with. He didn’t tell them he was a tithe.
Eddard Stark is the Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, and is in the House Stark. He agreed to become the hand of the king when King Robert Baratheon asked him to, and he is also the father of the following major and minor characters found in this novel: Robb Stark, Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Bran Stark, and Rickon Stark. Daenerys Targaryen is the “Mother of Dragons,” and is forced to marry a Dothraki leader, Khal Drogo, by her brother Viserys Targaryen for his own selfish benefits in seeking power. She is one of the reasons why her brother, husband, and unborn child are deceased.
The Grand Inquisitor, as described by Ivan, puts himself in a very pessimistic attitude toward human nature, he states humans are in essence weak and they need to be controlled through miracle mystery and authority. On this thematic I chose the following quote, “That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious.” (Dostoyevsky, 37). Because according to how the Grand Inquisitor’s vision of the world, even after meeting Jesus, having the blood and flesh of
The late nineteenth century gave rise to a new literary movement called realism. Realism is the attempt to create an accurate portrayal of life in literature without filter. The movement aims to portray the life of people from all walks of life, but especially of the working class and the poor. Two of the most acclaimed writers from this movement are Leo Tolstoy from Russia, and Guy de Maupassant from France. Their works, “How Much Land Does a Man Need,” and “The Jewels,” respectively, portray the life of two characters from different lifestyles.
“Master and Man” (1895) is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy is widely ranked among the greatest writers of all time with such classics as War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1877), and the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). His output also includes plays and essays. In “Master and Man,” Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, a landowner, departs from the village of Kresty for a short journey with Nikita, one of his peasants.
He describes the objection as, “all men desire the apparent good, but have no control over the appearance, but the end appears to each man in a form answering to his character” (1114b). This view argues that all people pursue that which seems good, but some people cannot see the true good, which is out of their control. The immediate implication of this objection, if it is indeed true, suggests that “no one is responsible for his own evildoing” (1114b).
To what extent does the nature and form of a film and literature influence what is or is not presented as “reality?” How do we define what is considered as realism and what isn’t?In the world of realism we find ourselves engulfed in an attitude of living in the moment. By this I mean in regards to realism, we deal with situations as they arise. We do not plan or fabricate or use emotions; we use logic. We see this realism prevalent in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.
"Doctor Zhivago" is a classic scandalous novel by Boris Pasternak. It includes both romance and history. This book was such a big success that they later made a movie about it. The modern movie has many differences from the book in order to make it easier to understand and more entertaining. The director of the movie also managed to keep many important scenes from the book.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's magnum opus, narrates (pedophile) middle-aged Humbert Humbert's journey accross the United States with Dolores Haze, his Lolita, the 12-year-old nymphet whom he fell in love with. Mr. Humbert is aware of the lack of normality in the ages of the females he finds desirable. He is prompt to justify this by telling the reader about Annabel. She - and Humbert - were 13 years old, and they loved each other, but she died prematurely and left him with a life-lasting desire for other Annabels. After having lost his first love, something froze inside Humbert Humbert, and he could never feel attracted to women who did not resemble her in age.
The Beauty of Myshkin’s Spirit The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky invites the reader into a world dominated by lust, greed, and human depravity. However, throughout it all, Myshkin stands out as a virtuous glimmer of hope for mankind. In the assigned passage, the reader can see the immense extent to which Myshkin contrasts with the other people in the novel. In the excerpt we discussed, Dostoevsky provides a prime example of Myshkin’s characterizing charm and appeasing demeanor.
The world has so much complexity included in the price of living. This price of living includes the existentialist thoughts known as, questioning who God is and why did he create us, if he did? No human in today’s day and age has any firsthand experience of the creation of the world. Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, proposed the theory of humans creating the idea of God to somehow explain the ambiguous idea hypothesized by Dostoevsky. Humans can not simply deal with the idea of not knowing how the world was created and how we got here.
