The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family\u27s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murder, Dostoyevsky\u27s dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur, and everyone\u27s faith in humanity is tested. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family\u27s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murder, Dostoyevsky\u27s dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur, and everyone\u27s faith in humanity is tested. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

The Brothers Karamazov

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family\u27s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murder, Dostoyevsky\u27s dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur, and everyone\u27s faith in humanity is tested. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

@YakovGolyadkin

This is an archive of the Twitter feed @YakovGolyadkin, which tweeted Dostoevsky's novel The Double from its protagonist's perspective in November 2015

The mimetic politics of lone-wolf terrorism

Written at a time of crisis in the project of social and political modernity, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from Underground offers an intriguing parallel for the twenty-first century lone-wolf; it portrays an abject, outcast, spiteful unnamed anti-hero boiling with rage, bitter with resentment and on the verge of radicalisation. A Girardian reading of the poetic truths contained in Dostoevsky’s work is able to provide important keys to explain the contemporary transformation from ‘fourth-wave’ religious terrorism to ‘fifth-wave’ lone-wolf terrorism. Such a reading argues that it is mimetic rivalry – rather than much-trumpeted forms of religious violence or cultural differences – that fuels the triangular relation between governments, terrorists and civilian victims at heart of terrorist acts. This approach is further able to blend social inquiry with an account of the individual, in fact anthropological, conditions of lone-wolf terrorism by tracing the globalisation of resentment and the individualisation of violence to the hyper-mimeticism characterising the globalisation of late modernity. Finally, a mimetic reading of ‘fifth-wave’ terrorism accounts for the turbulence of a global politics in which victimhood and scapegoating no longer have the ability to stabilise social order and warns against a future where violence proliferates and escalates unchecked

Lifestyle gambling, indebtedness and anxiety: A deviant leisure perspective

While once subject to wide-ranging state control, gambling has successfully culturally embedded itself within the normalised and legitimised forms of leisure such as the night-time economy, sports fandom and online forums of socialisation. Consequently, this article argues that existing research which conceptualises gambling as separate from everyday life is largely obsolete in the contemporary context. We argue here that gambling has become an integral feature of the wider masculine weekend leisure experience, intimately connected to an infantilised consumer identity that is peculiar to late-capitalism. This article, drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research among what we term ‘lifestyle gamblers’, utilises a deviant leisure perspective to problematise the myriad harms that emerge from this relationship, situated within a broader critique of consumerism and global capitalism. While social gambling is defended fiercely by the industry, this article argues that an identity-based culture of sports-betting that attaches fragile social and cultural capital to the allure of the gambling win encourages the chasing of losses and impulsive betting. Underscored by a culture of readily available and high-interest credit, we explore how gamblers in a technologically accelerated culture develop a pathological relationship to money as it becomes desublimated and loses its symbolic value. Such processes, exacerbated by the promise of consumer culture, have the potential to cast these young adults into a paralysing reality of indebtedness that is fraught with depression, stress, domestic instability and destructive behaviours of consumption

Migration and access to health care in English medical law: a rhetorical critique

This paper develops a rhetorical critique of recent cases on migration and access to health care in Britain. It argues that the national territory, once a taken-for-granted starting point for reasoning in medical law, has lost its common-sense status as a result of neoliberal globalisation. This is evident in recent decisions involving on the one hand HIV-positive asylum seekers coming to the UK and on the other hand British ‘health tourists’ seeking funding for treatment elsewhere in the European Union. Courts are aware that many of these cases are likely to call forth the sympathy of audiences for the individual concerned, further undermining their privileging of the national scale. In curbing this ‘politics of pity’ they adopt a range of persuasive strategies

Paul Nizan: conspiracy and the contemplation of crime

Paul Nizan (1905-1940) is also known in France as the ‘impossible communist’, for his long-term allegiance to the Party and the abrupt cancellation of his membership, in the late 1930s, following the Nazi-Soviet pact. This paper discusses a number of his writings, focusing particularly on his best known novel, The Conspiracy, where a revolutionary cell plans illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address ‘cultural’ aspects of crime and refer to notions such as ‘thrill’ and ‘seductions of crime’ among others. These notions, it will be argued, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel