Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The sublime, the city and the present age
- 2 Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
- 3 The present age: the age of the city
- 4 ‘Cosmopolitan faces’
- 5 Food for thought
- 6 A literary scandal
- 7 The reception of Either/Or
- 8 New Year's Day
- 9 Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century (1) Manet
- 10 Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century (2) Dostoevsky
- 11 Learning to read the signs of the times
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century (2) Dostoevsky
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The sublime, the city and the present age
- 2 Kierkegaard and the world of the feuilletons
- 3 The present age: the age of the city
- 4 ‘Cosmopolitan faces’
- 5 Food for thought
- 6 A literary scandal
- 7 The reception of Either/Or
- 8 New Year's Day
- 9 Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century (1) Manet
- 10 Kierkegaard and the nineteenth century (2) Dostoevsky
- 11 Learning to read the signs of the times
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As an exercise in the history of ideas, the comparison between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky needs little justification. They were already being linked at the beginning of the twentieth century as amongst those best representing the spirit of modernism. So, for example, Dr Angelo Rappoport in the English modernist journal The New Age:
The superman was the dream of all poets and philosophers. Everyone imagined him in his own way. Flaubert and Renan, Carlyle and Emerson, Kierkegaard and Dostoieffsky, Wagner, Ibsen, and Nietzsche. Only, none of them went so far as the last named. Most of them returned ruefully from their weary journey to the place where they had started from. Such were Carlyle and Emerson, such were Dostoieffsky, Ibsen and Kierkegaard.
Martin Buber could speak in the early 1900s of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky ‘as the two men of the nineteenth century who will’ … ‘“remain” in the centuries to come’.
After the First World War and throughout the era of existentialism (approximately, therefore, from 1920 to 1960) Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, along with Nietzsche, continued to be named as the three great nineteenth-century precursors of existentialist thought.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002