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Editors Joan Grossman and Ruth Rischin pose to their contributors an intriguing question: What happens when the ideas of a thinker like William James, who--despite his originality--was deeply rooted in American traditions, are refracted through a culture that draws on a heritage profoundly different from his own? Including studies of reception and interpretation of James's major works and analyses of the impact of his own philosophy on certain Russian writers and thinkers, William James in Russian Culture reveals striking parallels among and divergences between the intellectual and the spiritual realms.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 William James: The European Connection Chapter 3 Adventures in Time and Space: Dostoevsky, William James, and the Perilous Journey to Conversion Chapter 4 What Men Live By: Belief and the Individual in Lev Tolstoy and William James Chapter 5 The Moral Equivalent of War: Violence in the Later Fiction of Lev Tolstoy Chapter 6 Phlosophers, Decadents, and Mystics: James's Russian readers in the 1890's Chapter 7 James and Viacheslav Ivanov at the Threshold of Consciousness Chapter 8 William James in the Moscow Psychological Society: Pragmatism, Pluralism, Personalism Chapter 9 Lev Shestov's James: A Knight of Free Creativity Chapter 10 James and Konovalov: The Varieties of Religious Experience and Russian Theology Between Revolutions Chapter 11 Gorky and God-Building Chapter 12 James and Vocabularies of Contemporary Russian Spirituality Chapter 13 Afterword: William James in Contexts, Plural
About the author
Donna Tussing Orwin is Professor Emerita of the Department of Slavic, Eurasian, and European Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient in 2008 of the Pushkin Medal for her contribution “to the rapprochement and mutual enrichment of different people’s cultures and the study and popularisation of Russian language and culture.”
