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What is the link between comedy and tragedy? Why do both laughing and crying involve tears? How is comedy related to tickling? Why do we laugh more in modern times? These and many other questions answered in a philosophical discussion based on René Girard's essay on the topic, "Perilous Balance: A Comic Hypothesis."

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We start where we left off in Part 1: Dostoevsky the romantic wakes up and realizes he lives in the underground, filled with resentment, frustrated ambition, and tormenting idols. The underground man struggles to break free in the character of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment and the teacher in The Gambler.

We then encounter formidable idols that attract and foment underground passions all around them: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot and Nikolai Stavrogin in The Possessed. Dostoevsky shows how such demons cannot lead anywhere but destruction. The author depicts the depths of rebellion as a human universal and as a particular of his place and age.

Finally, in The Brothers Karamazov, the Devil has a mask-off moment and shows his face. But Christ also shows up. The demonic nature of the underground torment and fascination is fully revealed. Christ stands accused by the Grand Inquisitor, who wants to build a society without him. But only Christ can reveal the perdition of obsessing over idols, enemies, and sinful fathers, whom one inevitably ends up imitating, and the way out that obsession and into a whole, undivided humanity.

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A review of the life and works of the great Fyodor Dostoevsky following René Girard's book Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground. A masterpiece of literary criticism in its own right, this book brings edifying and brilliant insights into Dostoevsky's own masterpieces, but only by connecting them to the novelist's lesser works and personal life.

Girard traces a coherent arch in Dostoevsky's life and works, from a frustrated naive romantic trying to fit into the literary fads of the age while coping with his personal inadequacies to a man who experiences a spiritual breakthrough and perceives the unflattering, diabolical truths about the motives that drive him. These motives have everything to do with Girard's mimetic theories on desire and on modernity, theories that came to him while reading Dostoevsky, among other novelists, as a young academic.

We begin to see how Dostoevsky's and Girard's works are coupled and how they provide such a powerful, prophetic interpretation of modernity.

Part 2 will be covered in the next episode, which traces the arch from Dostoevsky awakening in the underground, to struggling to escape it, and finally to the spectacular resurrection out of it.

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