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Physical Pain and Justice - Greek Tragedy and the Russian Novel (Hardcover)
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Physical Pain and Justice - Greek Tragedy and the Russian Novel (Hardcover)
Series: Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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It has been said that all great literature is about suffering. But
before the twentieth century, physical pain, one of the most primal
forms of human suffering, has rarely been represented on the stage
and in fiction. But when it is foregrounded in works of literature,
it is not only the most dramatic way of representing human
suffering, it is also used to explore, in the most intense form,
existential questions regarding the meaning of human existence and
the justice of the universe. Perhaps it is not entirely
coincidental, then, that imaginative works about physical pain,
though few in number, figure prominently among the masterpieces of
the western literary tradition. The best were written during two of
the west's most astonishing periods of literary creativity,
fifth-century-BC Athens and nineteenth-century Russia, and by the
most prominent artists of their time: Prometheus Bound by
Aeschylus, The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes by Sophocles; Notes
from the House of the Dead by Dostoevsky; and The Death of Ivan
Ilyich and War and Peace by Tolstoy. In all these works, physical
pain is always portrayed as a dynamic process that includes the
view point of the victim, the perpetrator (much of the physical
pain is in the form of torture), and the onlooker or witness. In
the Greek works, physical pain is the main vehicle for exposing the
injustice of the gods and the world order, and in the Russian works
for questioning the moral legitimacy of the state. In Prometheus
Bound, Zeus delegitimizes his rule by torturing Prometheus for his
service to mankind. In The Women of Trachis, the gods look
indifferently upon the excruciating suffering of Hercules, the
greatest Greek hero. In Philoctetes, the gods cruelly exploit the
terrible pain of the hero as a means of winning victory at Troy for
their Greek wards. In the Russian works, the mechanisms for
inflicting the maximum amount of physical pain during corporal
punishment undermine the moral foundations of the state and argue
for its dissolution. Though the Greek and Russian works are
separated by genre (plays vs novels) and by time (over two thousand
years), they are united by the way they employ pain to investigate
the justice-or rather injustice-of the world order.
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