The Cosmic Library On Dreams And Math In Dostoevsky

The Cosmic Library explores monolithic books successful bid to research everything else. Here, books that tin look overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn retired to beryllium intensely accessible, offering truthful galore different ways to publication them and deliberation pinch them. Season 1 considered Finnegans Wake; successful play two, it was 1,001 Nights; play three, nan Hebrew Bible; play four, Journey to nan West; play five, nan American short story. Now, it’s The Brothers Karamazov.

In this play of The Cosmic Library, you’ve heard america talk really Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers converge, moreover arsenic they’re connected seemingly chopped tracks. And nan caller directs attraction to convergences successful astonishing ways: astatine 1 point, for example, Ivan Karamazov alludes to non-Euclidean geometry successful which parallel lines meet—in which different abstracted things join. 

It doesn’t conscionable hap mathematically, aliases philosophically: dreams, too, tin bring nan novel’s characters toward convergence. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky scholar, says here: “Dreams that characters person are arsenic important to them, successful nan agelong run, and arsenic illuminating to them successful nan agelong run, arsenic immoderate philosophical ideas that they mightiness embrace.” Math and dreams some connection intends by which replacement ways of reasoning tin beryllium accessed, and by which separations mightiness get resolved aliases reconsidered.

Mathematician and subject journalist Paulina Rowińska says successful this episode, “Math is overmuch richer than what we study successful school. And nan cardinal point, that’s besides applicable to Dostoevsky, is that mathematics is besides relative, arsenic pinch Euclidean/non-Euclidean.” Different geometries, different philosophies, and different states of consciousness each connection ways for characters to deliberation differently, and change, and collide successful The Brothers Karamazov. No azygous strategy seems victorious here, but nan process that moves done strategy aft system—or characteristic aft character—works pinch irresistibly vital, melodramatic force.

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Guests for this play of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, writer of nan novel City connected Fire

Andrew Martin, writer of nan communicative collection Cool for America

Hearty White, big of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, writer of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian lit astatine Brandeis University and writer of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of nan Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian lit astatine nan University of British Columbia and writer of Writing Fear: Russian Literature and nan Gothic

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