Word: stavrogin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...toward chaos, Camus uses an onstage narrator who streamlines the transition between scenes (some take only eight seconds). The play roils with the deluded intrigues of nihilists, whom Camus makes strongly reminiscent of modern Marxists. Perhaps the play's chief quality is Camus' adroit emphasis of Nikolay Stavrogin (ably played by Pierre Vaneck), the book's most memorably monstrous character. An empty-souled aristocrat, Stavrogin longs to be a sort of Nietzschean superman. He instigates a band of young revolutionaries to murder, rapes his landlady's little daughter, finally commits suicide. In the hands of Camus...
Silence in the Street. Some critics will reach for their nearest Dostoevsky, but Nabokov himself disdains comparison with the other Russian, whom he regards as a clumsy and vulgar writer. Yet, the suppressed criminal episode in Dostoevsky's' The Possessed invites analogy with Lolita. Stavrogin, Dostoevsky's moral monster, seduced an innocent. The difference is that Stavrogin told of his crime to prove he was capable of it; Nabokov's character tells his agonized story to show that he was incapable of not committing it. In Nabokov's world, crime is its own punishment...
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