MIKE MENDIS

Essay #1:

Messiah or Alter Ego? The Role of Prince Myshkin in  Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Word Count: 5334 words + Works Cited

Format: MLA

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the traditional reading of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which Prince Myshkin is interpreted as a Christ-like or Messianic figure, a sort of Russian Christ come to save Russia, is mistaken. In its place, the paper offers an interpretation that reads the Myshkin character as Dostoevsky’s alter ego. This interpretation is based on a psychological reading of the novel and draws, among other things, upon biographical material from Dostoevsky’s own life. On this view, the novel must be read as an allegory for Dostoevsky’s life and for his deepest inner longings. Allegorically, Myshkin represents Dostoevsky’s ego-ideal, Rogozhin his dark side (or “shadow”), and Natasya his persona as a writer and literary figure. Other allegorical correspondences are also explored. After first examining why the traditional interpretation is problematic, the paper outlines in detail the alternative reading. Following this, the paper presents the evidence on which the alternative reading is based.  This evidence is examined in two sections: (1) extratextual evidence, that is, evidence that is external to the text of The Idiot; and (2) intratextual evidence, that is, evidence that is internal to The Idiot. The paper concludes that Dostoevsky himself was partly responsible for misleading people into thinking that the novel was about Christ, that he may not have been consciously aware that he was allegorizing his own life in writing the novel, and that in writing the novel he was perhaps unconsciously undertaking to do psychotherapy on himself.

Essay #2:

Eugene Onegin: Veiled Elegy on the Death of the Russian Soul

Word Count: 6753 words + Works Cited

Format: MLA

ABSTRACT: This paper offers an interpretation of Pushkin’s verse novel, Eugene Onegin, that is a radical departure from ones that have been in vogue since the work was first published in 1833, an interpretation that sees the work as an elegy on the death of the Russian soul. The paper contends that Pushkin was forced to mask his elegy and cast it in the form of a verse novel on account of the disrepute into which the elegy as a literary form had fallen as a result of the rise of Romanticism. The paper makes the case that Eugene Onegin must be read as a satirical allegory for the gradual eclipse of the essential Russianness of the Russian soul under the onslaught of the Westernizing influences from Europe that followed in the wake of the reforms instituted by Peter the Great. The novel’s heroine, Tatyana, is seen as a personification of the Russian soul, and its hero, Onegin, for whom the work is named, as a personification of the Russian character. Through extensive reference to the work itself and to commentary from noted literary critics, including Belinsky and Dostoevsky, the paper lays out the details of the allegory and the allegorical significance of the love relationship between Onegin and Tatyana. The paper concludes that Pushkin was prophetic in elegizing the death of the Russian soul, for it was precisely this death that paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution just three-quarters of a century later.

Essay #3:

Gorky’s Mother: A Precursor of Socialist Realism

Word Count: 2128 words + Works Cited

Format: MLA

ABSTRACT: This paper examines Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother in the light of the later doctrine of Socialist Realism articulated by Gorky in 1933, three decades after he wrote Mother. Its purpose is to trace elements in the novel that embody the principles of socialist realism that would suggest that the novel served as a precursor to Gorky’s later doctrine. After a review of the basic tenets of socialist realism, especially its commitment to “truthfulness” (or verisimilitude), and a tracing of its historical antecedents in critical realism, the essay examines the reception that Mother received when it was first published. Following this, the paper picks out several themes in Mother that later become central to socialist realism, such as the opposition to capitalism, the education and enlightenment of the masses, and the inculcation of spiritual values apart from religion and the Russian Orthodox Church (that is, the creation of a socialist “religion”).

Essay #4:

The Figure of the Mother in Maxim Gorky’s Mother

Word Count: 5126 words + Works Cited

Format: MLA

ABSTRACT: This paper traces the personal and psychological development of the character of the Mother in Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother, from an abused, uneducated, downtrodden housewife to an outspoken champion of the socialism. This evolution takes place in several stages, with five major turning points in the plot and several “awakenings” that occur in the Mother’s consciousness as she emerges from the shadows into the limelight. Gorky chose a mother to be the protagonist of his novel quite deliberately as a way of dramatizing the birth of what he hoped was a new consciousness in the Russian soul following the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Gorky drew on his maternal grandmother, a loving, compassionate, deeply religious woman, in creating the figure of the Mother. However, he takes his protagonist far beyond the dutiful—but oppressed—housewife that his grandmother was, showing how by gradual degrees she is transformed into a politically conscious member of Russian society. In fact, in the novel, she becomes a figure of the Russian people as a whole, for her transformation parallels the transformation of Russian society. She embodies the expanding circle of consciousness, from concern for one’s immediate family to concern for one’s circle of friends, and from there to society as a whole, and ultimately to the entire world. The Mother’s story is a story of self-development, self-education, and self-enlightenment, and ultimately of self-sacrifice for the greater good. The paper concludes with the observation that Gorky’s optimism for the Russian Revolution was perhaps misplaced, for the revolution did not usher in the kind of society that he envisioned in the novel, but one that was as harsh and repressive as the one that it overthrew.