St. Augustine's Press
The text of the book itself is written in straightforward, non-technical language
which presupposes only a basic familiarity with Dostoevsky’s works. This style will
make Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life accessible to both students and teachers of ethics, literature, and religion.
Early reactions to Dostoyevsky and the Affirmation of Life “No modern writer can compare with Dostoevsky in the imprecations that his character Ivan Karamazov utters against the cruelties of an unjust God. To what extent can these views be identified with the author himself? The Dostoevsky literature is strewn with opposing answers to this question. Prof. Predrag Cicovacki cuts his way through this tangle by giving all sides a fair hearing, but stressing, much more than others have done, Dostoevsky’s rather neglected insistence on the affirmation of life rather than on the quest for its meaning. Prof. Cicovacki attempts to show that the affirmation of life contained in Dostoevsky’s novels can encompass evil without surrendering to the pessimism and despair that overcome Ivan. No serious student of the writer can afford to overlook this penetrating, erudite and insightful study.” – Joseph Frank, author of the five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, Professor Emeritus of
Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages, Stanford University
“Predrag Cicovacki presents an impressive multidimensional account of Dostoevsky’s central novels. This book contains a thorough literary analysis of Dostoevsky’s texts, yet it proceeds in such a way that even those who haven’t yet
read all of the considered novels will find this analysis interesting and enthralling. But the author’s main concern is philosophical, and the reader will easily extrapolate Cicovacki’s own philosophical interpretation of Dostoevsky’s literary heritage. Masterfully unfolding Dostoevsky’s philosophy of life in a variety of its manifestations, Cicovacki displays its vital significance for the proper understanding of the human condition in the 21st century.” – Ruben Apressyan, Head of the Department of Ethics at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor of Ethics at Lomonosov State University, Moscow, Russia
“Looking for eschatology in Dostoevsky’s great novels, this book is a philosophical investigation of a paradox: How does Dostoevsky succeed in uplifting people’s heart by telling tales full of sound and fury? Predrag Cicovacki’s answer is an inspiring offer to read Dostoevsky’s classics anew, with a figure in the carpet woven by Hegel.” – Horst- Jürgen Gerigk, cofounder of the International Dostoevsky Society and founder and editor-in-chief of Dostoevsky Studies; Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Heidelberg University, Germany
“Cicovacki summarizes Dostoevsky’s religious and moral positions and those of his characters in the light of later critics and earlier thinkers and artists. Whether one accepts or rejects the summaries, the book provokes serious thinking.” – Robert Belknap, author of The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text; Professor of Slavic Languages, Emeritus, and Director in University Seminars, Columbia University, New York
“This masterful discussion of the major works of Dostoevsky is quite possibly the best single volume written in English on the greatest writer of the Nineteenth Century. It takes the rare qualities of Predrag Cicovacki, a worthy scion of the grand tradition of broadly educated Central European Humanists, to artfully convey the philosophical essence and spiritual insights of the profoundest novelist of them all. Cicovacki expertly guides the Western reader through the darkest chasms and up to the most sublime pinnacles of the Russian Soul.” – Nalin Ranasinghe, Professor
of Philosophy, Assumption College, and author of Socrates in the Underworld (St. Augustine’s Press).
Predrag Cicovacki was born in 1960 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since 1991, he has taught philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (in Worcester, Massachusetts), where he also served as Director of Peace and Conflict Studies and as Editor-in-Chief of Diotima: A Philosophical Review. Cicovacki is the author of Anamorphosis: Kant on Knowledge and Ignorance (1997), Between Truth and Illusion: Kant at the Crossroads of Modernity (2002), and is the editor of works on Lewis White Beck and Albert Schweitzer, among other titles.
Affirmation of Life
352 pages, 6” x 9”, jacketed clothbound, $35.00
ISBN-13: 978-1-58731-190-1;
ISBN-10: 158731-190-9
preface, introduction, notes, illustrated,
bibliography, index
world rights
publication date: October 2008