Chapter � Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Ideology and Mythmaking 2.1 Dostoevsky’s Authorial Myth Dostoevsky1 and Tolstoy appear side by side as two men of literary genius, both brilliant journalists and non-trivial thinkers who, through their life and art ex- pressed, throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, the existential religious path and the consolidation of a new religious consciousness that would become the hallmark of Russia’s philosophical ‘Silver Age’. In the second half of the 19th century, nearly every critic, journalist, and social activist, as well as the entirety of the student population, were in one way or another powerfully influenced by these two figures. The two writers were of interest not solely to journalists but also to scholars, and not only to secular youth but also to students of theol- ogy. In her interesting study, N.Y. Sukhova presents detailed statistics concern- ing dissertation topics related to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky across the Russian Empire’s four theological academies in the period of 1891–1918. Remarkably, the very first dissertation, in 1891, was devoted to Tolstoy’s religiosity, while the first work on Dostoevsky had to wait until 1900.2 Tolstoy became an object of theological reflection as soon as he found his faith, whereas Dostoevsky would only begin to be considered in a similar light two decades after his death. The two writers’ movement in the direction of a distinctive religious con- sciousness had opposite motives. Dostoevsky avowedly directed all his powers to the defense of monarchy and of traditional Orthodox faith, affirming their basic positions and values. Tolstoy, on the other hand, entered into a polem- ic with them, revealing a profound crisis of the state system, of the Russian Orthodox Church, and of institutional religion. Both writers, though, pro- duced original teachings concerning Christianity and thereby made possible a broad public discussion of religion not only in Russia, but also across Europe.3 1 For a survey of literature concerning Dostoevsky’s journalism, see George Woodcock, ‘Dosto- evsky in Our Time’, The Sewanee Review, v. 103, No. 3 (Summer 1995), 463–70. 2 Н.Ю. Сухова, ‘Творчество Ф.М. Достоевского и Л.Н. Толстого в кандидатских работах выпускников российских духовных академий’, Л.Н. Толстой и Ф.М. Достоевский: зада- чи христианства и христианство как задача. Международная научная конференция, 2–5 октября 2011, 128–54. 3 Studies of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s influence over European culture include: Д.С. Мережковский, Толстой и Достоевский, 1901–1902; Л.И. Шестов, Ницше и Достоевский, 1924; Н.Д. Тихомиров, ‘Ницше и Достоевский’, Богословский вестник, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044406�3_004 Svetlana Klimova - 9789004440623 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:49:42PM via free access <UN> 64 Chapter � Chronologically, Dostoevsky emerged first, beginning his career almost a de- cade before Tolstoy. In the 1840s, he established himself as literary name, en- during the difficult experience of exile and penal servitude, which quickly ex- tinguished his youthful idealism and turned him toward a path of Orthodox Christianity (as relived by him in Notes From the House of the Dead).4 His return to significant literature in the 1860s made him a fashionable writer-martyr; and his monarchist and Orthodox views soon transformed him into a flagship of national-patriotic (pochvennik) and conservative political thought. In spite of Dostoevsky’s creation (jointly with Mikhail Dostoevsky, Nikolay Strakhov, and Apollon Grigoryev) of a new pro-Slavophile movement, pochven- nichestvo, in 1860, he was not, in actuality, a partisan writer, an ideologue, or an apologist of the state, the church, or the political interests du jour. His private experience of life and his artistic vision are intimately intertwined in his art. More than others, his works let us sense the pulse of his epoch, while at the same time allowing us to remain immersed in the subtle psychological current of his art, with its singular manner of expressing global ideas and meanings. Dostoevsky’s creations represent a complex phenomenon, comprehensible through a layer-by-layer reconstruction of the artist’s perception of his subject, which is the multiplicity of felt human experience. ‘Truly, it was not so much God that tormented Dostoevsky as the human—its reality, its depths, its fate- fully criminal or benign and virtuous actions’.5 Dostoevsky studied the human not empirically, but metaphysically and spiritually, attempting to see through the visible experience and the multifariousness of everyday events in order to divine his essence and to reveal human nature and the nature of Russianness. Far more than other writers, Dostoevsky was ‘tormented’ by the need to enter into the special sensory, emotional, and psychological states by means of which a person experiences himself, God, and the world, and which can be conceived as oppositions: of ideal and sinful, of holiness and painful pas- sion, of abstract reasoning and concrete act, of contemplation and practical 1902, т. ii, No. 5–8, 518.; А.В. Смирнов, Достоевский и Ницше, Казань, 1903, 13; М.Ф. Зайд- ман, Достоевский в западной литературе (Одесса, 1911); B. Tramer, ‘Dostojevskij a Ni- etzsche’, Prisprvek ke konfrantaci reakcnich zdroju in “Slavia” (Praha), Rocnik xx, Sesit 1, 1950; Л.И. Шестов, Добро в учении графа Толстого и Ницше, 1899; Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tol- stoy and The Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of Long Conversion, 1845–1887 (Boul- der: Lexington, 2008); Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); И.И. Евлампиев, ‘Толстовские мотивы в трактате Ф. Ницше “Антихрист”’, Философские науки, 2014, No. 1, 88–102. 4 Л.И. Сараскина, Достоевский, 2 изд. (М.: Молодая гвардия, 2013). 5 В.В. Зеньковский, История русской философии (М.: Эксмо, Фолио, 2001), 408. Svetlana Klimova - 9789004440623 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:49:42PM via free access <UN> Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Ideology and Mythmaking 65 disposition. Dostoevsky was certainly not an ‘orthodox Orthodox’,6 despite his personal allegiance to the Church. Moreover, like Tolstoy, he had no mystical inclinations.7 ‘Russian Christianity’, he wrote, ‘has, in actuality, no mysticism in it whatsoever, it is all compassion, all Christ’s image—at the very least, that is what’s central’.8 His discourse intertwines traditional-Orthodox, folk- Orthodox, philosophical, psychological, and subjective views of the real and ideal states of human nature, refracted through the writer’s individual mythology. The sub- ject of this mythology was society itself, and the prism through which the life of state, society, ideas, culture, and religion was refracted was the person, in all its variety and complexity. Mythmaking is a complicated process, characterized by the following features: first, it is the production and re- production of generalizations on the basis of concrete and sensory im- ages; second, such generalizations are not interpretable in principle, i.e. the relation of their contents to the subjective and objective conditions of their emergence bypass consciousness and find no explanation within its reflexive field; third, any product of mythmaking is a unity of knowl- edge and the felt experience of reality; fourth, mythmaking is an object of a willed self-determination of the subject.9 Further, it is not a product of feeble reasoning or of the peculiarities of the art- ist’s perception, but a ‘reliable aspect of the person’s everyday living and being and one of the universal means of harmonizing the constantly-changing rela- tions of a concrete individual (with his needs, interests, and motives) and the world’.10 Dostoevsky’s charisma as a great writer-prophet turned his art and his subjective myth of life experience into the basis for interpreting the mythmak- ing of the entire pre-revolutionary epoch. His poetic myth, representing the nationalist ideas of Russia’s present and its future, coupled with notions of the 6 For a theological study of Dostoevsky, see: Т.А. Касаткина, Священное в повсе- дневном: Двухсоставный образ в произведениях Ф.М. Достоевского. М.: ИМЛИ РАН, 2015. Similar methods of ‘religious criticism’ are employed by Tolstoy scholars: А.Б. Тарасов, ‘“Религиозное литературоведение” как путь к пониманию творчества Л.Н. Толстого’, Духовный потенциал русской классической литературы. Сборник научных трудов (М.: Русский мир, 2007), 508–14. 7 Л.М. Розенблюм, ‘Творческие дневники Достоевского’, Неизданный Достоев- ский. Записные книжки и тетрадки 1860–1881 (М.: Наука, 1971), 14. 8 Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, 23, 130. 9 В.М. Найдыш, ‘Мифотворчество в деятельности сознания’, Вопросы философии, 2017, No. 5, 26. 10 Ibid., 30. Svetlana Klimova - 9789004440623 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:49:42PM via free access <UN> 66 Chapter � ‘Russian idea’, Russia’s messianic role, and the dual nature of the person, proved to be so contagious and attractive to so many different groups of raznochintsy and the intelligentsia within Russian society, that they came to be perceived not as a product of an individual creative imagination (albeit, an imagination of genius) but as entirely real and realizable blueprints for the most efficient improvement of actuality. Having infiltrated minds, an idea might achieve the status of reality: ‘The fantastic’, he wrote in a letter to Yulia Fyodorovna Abaza, ‘must so closely approach the real that you would nearly believe in it’.11 Dostoevsky’s type of journalism represents