Studio di J. M. Coetzee sul Ruolo della Confessione in specifiche opere di Fëdor Dostoevskij e Lev Tolstoj

The dissertation is about J. M. Coetzee's analysis of the role of confession in Notes from the Underground, The Idiot and The Possessed by Fëdor Dostoevskij and in The Kreutzer Sonata by Lev Tolstoj. Coetzee's study is drawn from Doubling the Point, a collection of essays and interviews published by him in 1992. More precisely, the dissertation focuses on Coetzee's essay titled Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoj, Rousseau, Dostoevskij and wants to understand how Russian literature is perceived by the South African author. His comment is thus juxtaposed to Russian critics' articles, entirely translated into English by myself, in order to comprehend whether Tolstoj and Dostoevskij's interpretation varies depending on the experts' cultural backgrounds. The goal is to understand how different cultural origins influence the analysis of the above-mentioned writers. The analysis of Dostoevskij and Tolstoj is restricted to the subject of confession and self-investigation. The four novels Coetzee's study is based on are deeply related to self-analysis and provide different types of confessions. Coeztee's goal is to understand whether such confessions are authentic or not and, consequently, whether a man can (or cannot) truly speak about himself.