The burden of vision: Dostoevsky's spiritual art

George A. Panichas' essays on Dostoevsky's art and thought have gained wide praise for their critical power and insight. The Burden of Vision, culminating twenty years of studying, teaching, and writing on Dostoevsky, Professor Panichas devotes himself to a careful assessment of the religious themes and meanings of Dostoevsky's major novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazou. Throughout, Professor Panichas sees Dostoevsky's religious imagination in its radical, prophetic, and eschatological dimensions. "Dostoevsky's novels push the reader into the relentless complexity of moral war in which no human emotion is spared and no intricacy is reduced." Focusing on the pervasive spiritual consciousness at work in Dostoevsky's art, Panichas views the Russian author not as a religious doctrinaire, but as a visionary whose "five great novels constitute a sequential meditation on man's human and superhuman destiny.""Dr. Panichas' book is a major event in a long history of critical literature on Dostoevsky. It follows, in its own way, the tradition of such religiously inspired and profound critics as N. Berdyaev, V. Ivanov and Romano Guardini. It is the best from the pen of an American author, comparable only to G. Steiner's 'Tolstoy or Dost0evsky'.Both Panichas' understanding of Orthodox Christian mysticism and his subtle critical gift have enabled him to reach that point of intellectual empathy with Dostoevsky which has eluded most secular-minded critics."SERGEI LEVITZKYEmeritus, Georgetown UniversityGEORGE A. PANICHAS holds the Ph.D. from Nottingham University, England, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of the United Kingdom. Among his numerous writings is The Reverent Discipline: Essays in Literary Criticism and Culture (1974). Since 1962 he has been professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, and since 1984, editor of the quarterly Modern Age.