Dostoevsky-Shakespeare: What Shakes Dostoevsky?

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Dostoevsky’s fascination with Shakespeare and his inquiry into the “accursed questions” began when only a teenager. Both authors are interested in the visibility of action as a manifestation of subterranean issues, what seems and what appears, and the psychic drama reflective of political and cultural problems that their characters internalize. In this course, we will explore the complex layering that allows the two authors to explore and comment on the dialectical relationship between human beings, the self’s interaction with the self, and the role of art for the audience. Can the two authors’ works be considered life manuals where they lay out the poetics of existence? We will be looking at some of their works, including Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Hamlet (Shakespeare), and others, as processes where the first step is to identify societal issues as riddles, followed by the acknowledgment that a certain riddle is a worthy pursuit.