{"id":1443,"date":"2010-06-14T21:56:59","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T20:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/?p=1443"},"modified":"2010-06-22T11:16:01","modified_gmt":"2010-06-22T10:16:01","slug":"live-from-naples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/2010\/06\/14\/live-from-naples\/","title":{"rendered":"Live from Naples"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m currently at the 14th<\/sup> International Dostoevsky Symposium in Naples, which started this morning. I missed the opening sessions so don\u2019t have a great deal to report yet except to say that the surroundings in the Palazzo Du Mesnil are really rather sumptuous, and they provided us with a very fine lunch, for which I arrived just in time. Apparently the highlight of the morning was Robert Louis Jackson\u2019s presentation, which returned to a much-discussed subject, but one which is very dear to my heart, the role of Holbein\u2019s painting ‘Christ in the Tomb’ in The Idiot<\/em>, so I\u2019m slightly annoyed to have missed that.<\/p>\n

In the afternoon Robert Belknap gave a really interesting talk on Crime and Punishment<\/em>. It started out in a fairly mundane way discussing the different plots, Raskolnikov\u2019s doubles, and the way that the different plots and characters comment on the main ones, and it took a while to get going, to the extent that at one point I wondered whether he would get round to saying anything different at all. Then in the last five minutes or so it really came to life when he started discussing Porfiry.<\/p>\n

The most thought-provoking point for me was that the novel doesn\u2019t provide us access to Porfiry\u2019s mind \u2013 obviously, for most of the novel we\u2019re with Raskolnikov, but there are significant passages where we have access to the thoughts of Svidrigailov, Razumihkin, and Dunia — in other words, the characters who function as the counterparts of Raskolnikov in the subplots that mirror the main one. Belknap suggested that this placed Porfiry in a unique position.<\/p>\n

But the character he didn\u2019t mention at all was Sonia, and we don\u2019t see inside her mind either.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been quite surprised while I\u2019ve been re-reading it recently quite how often we leave Raskolnikov and follow Razumikhin and Dunia in particular — much more than I remembered. But the closest we get to seeing her on her own is the end of part 3, chapter 4, when Svidrigailov follows her home, and that all comes from his point of view. For Belknap it was the fact that Porfiry is a detective that was of significance, but for me there is something very important in Dostoevsky\u2019s work as a whole relating to which characters we are given inner access to, and which we see from the outside. In Crime and Punishment<\/em> I don\u2019t think it\u2019s half as simple as a dichotomy of characters who reflect aspects of Raskolnikov\u2019s thoughts and actions and those who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m currently at the 14th International Dostoevsky Symposium in Naples, which started this morning. I missed the opening sessions so don\u2019t have a great deal to report yet except to say that the surroundings in the Palazzo Du Mesnil are really rather sumptuous, and they provided us with a very fine lunch, for which I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[91,528,69,88],"class_list":["post-1443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dostoevsky","tag-crime-and-punishment","tag-dostoevsky","tag-holbein","tag-the-idiot"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-nh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1443"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1470,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions\/1470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}