“There was a look of unbounded pride and contempt, almost hatred, in that face, and at the same time something confiding, something wonderfully simplehearted.” There began Prince Myshkin’s curiosity of and infatuation with the complex Nastasya Filippovna as he sat in awe of this woman’s picture in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot . This story, set in Russia during the late 1860’s, is one of continuous love rivalries which describe the life of the Russian aristocracy during that time period.
Prince Myshkin is described as the “ideal” man due to his compassion for everyone and his firm belief that there is a good side to all people. The story begins as Myshkin returns to Petersburg after a stay in a Swiss mental hospital for his epilepsy. Upon arrival in Russia, he visits distant relatives who are quite receptive to him and he ends up staying for a while. While there, he believes he has fallen in love with Nastasya Filippovna and prematurely proposes to her. She first accepts, but then rejects him. Nastasya is the driving force behind the novel and carries the reader, as well as the characters, from scene to scene.
The duration of the book consists of Myshkin’s quest for happiness and love through which he encounters jealousy for his love and for the love of those who love him. Unfortunately, the tragic end to this book, including the predicted death of Nastasya, causes Myshkin to regress to his former epileptic state.
The time directly following Myshkin’s first proposal to Nastasya stands out as an extremely memorable moment in the book. At Nastasya’s birthday party, several men bring money and begin bidding on her hand in marriage. Eventually, she announces to everyone that she wants to alter her lifestyle and start over as a poor woman. Any man who cannot accept her for who she is, she decides, is not the right man for her. She feels that all men are motivated by greed and that the men will not want her for love, only greed.
Myshkin feels that he can love Nastasya for who she is and not for her money and so he proposes to her. She immediately accepts and shocks the rest of the party. One of the other suitors, Rogozhin, offers to give up everything he has for Nastasya and Myshkin encourages her to accept his offer because this sacrifice shows that he truly loves Nastasya.
Inside The League by Scott Anderson, and Jon Lee Anderson
Inside The League by Scott Anderson, and Jon Lee Anderson
For over ten years progressive researchers in this country and in
Europe have been uncovering evidence linking certain American conservatives
and rightists to racist and fascist movements around the globe through a
shadowy organization called the World Anti-Communist League. Now the book
“Inside the League” exposes the hidden nature of the League and documents
in devastating detail a parade of League-affiliated authoritarian
ideologues marching from the death camps of Nazi Germany into the parlors
of Reagan’s White House. The idea for the book came when Jon Lee Anderson
was researching a series of columns on Latin American death squads for Jack
Anderson, (Jon Lee’s employer but not his relative). Enlisting the aid of
his brother Scott, the two first began tracing the connections between the
death squads but soon were unravelling networks and alliances that involved
terrorists, Nazi collaborators, racists, assassins, anti-Jewish bigots, and
right- wing anti-communist American politicians. The one factor all had in
common was their involvement with the World Anti-Communist League.
The Latin American death squads, for instance, were found to be linked
through an umbrella group of Central and South American rightists called
the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL). CAL in turn was
affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), lead by a retired
U.S. Major General, John Singlaub. Singlaub boasts WACL is the
coordinating body for raising private aid for the Contras, a task support
ed explicitly by the Reagan White House which has sent government officials
and glowing letters of support to WACL meetings in recent years.
WACL also serves as an umbrella for several Eastern European emigre
groups founded and lead by Nazi collaborators, and there is far more. As
the Anderson brothers write:
“We have examined the World Anti-Communist League…because it is the
one organization in which representatives of virtually every right-wing
extremist movement that has practiced unconventional warfare are to be
found. The League is the one constant in this netherworld; whether looking
at Croation terrorists, Norwegian neo-Nazis, Japanese war criminals, or
American ultra-rightists….” (p. x, Author’s Note).
WACL is more than a club for aging facists and their modern- day