Exile
eBook - PDF

Exile

The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters

  1. 224 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Exile

The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters

About this book

The life of a human community rests on common experience. Yet in modem life there is an experience common to all that threatens the very basis of community—the experience of exile. No one in the modem world has been spared the encounter with homelessness. Refugees and fugitives, the disillusioned and disenfranchised grow in number every day. Why does it happen? What does it mean? And how are we implicated?

David Patterson responds to these and related questions by examining exile, a primary motif in Russian thought over the last century and a half. By "exile" he means not only a form of punishment but an existential condition.

Drawing on texts by such familiar figures as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Brodsky, as well as less thoroughly examined figures, including Florensky, Shestov, Tertz, and Gendelev, Patterson moves beyond the political and geographical fact of exile to explore its spiritual, metaphysical, and linguistic aspects. Thus he pursues the connections between exile and identity, identity and meaning, meaning and language.

Patterson shows that the problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness, that the effort to return from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word, and that the exile of the word is an exile of the human being. By making heard voices from the Russian wilderness, Patterson makes visible the wilderness of the world.

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Yes, you can access Exile by David Patterson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Prefatory Remarks
  8. Part One: The Word in Collision
  9. Part Two: The Breach between Life and Word
  10. Part Three: The Rupture of Religious Discourse
  11. Part Four: The Exile Within
  12. Part Five: The Word in Exile
  13. Concluding Remarks
  14. Works Cited
  15. Index