Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wyman, Alina

Area of Concentration

Russian Language and Literature

Abstract

Brain fever is a recurring event in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels. It plays a major role in bringing his characters face to face with their buried inner conflicts, especially where an external attitude disguises or compensates for a deeper semi-conscious or unconscious truth which has been rejected. The occurrence of fever signals the insistent onset of a transformational process which will not abate until all self-deception has been burned away, bringing the light of consciousness to repressed and suppressed content and revealing a character’s essential personality. A close analysis of fever as a symptom of the psycho-physiological imperative of transformation in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov will be the focus of this thesis. It will operate through a psychodynamic lens which takes the theoretical writings of Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) as a starting point, traces corresponding themes in Dostoevsky’s novels, and then turns to the work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) to further describe the dark, far reaching psychological territory which Dostoevsky exposed in his creative realist fiction.

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