Dostoevsky and Religious Aesthetics: apophaticism and nihilism
Dostoiévski e Estética Religiosa: apofatismo e niilismo

Jimmy Sudário Cabral*1
*Professor no Departamento e no Programa de Pós Graduação em Ciência da Religião da Universidade de Juiz de Fora. Coordenador do Núcleo de Estudos da Religião em Dostoiévski e Tolstói e a sua recepção (NERDT). http://www.ufjf.br/ nerdt/nerdt/. Atualmente realiza estágio de pós doutoramento no Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskij Dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. http://www. pushkinskijdom.ru/.
Voltar ao Sumário

Resumo
Interpretar o pensamento de Dostoiévski como uma espécie de método apofático significa assumir a impossibilidade de compreendê-lo sem primeiro assumir a conexão intrínseca entre religião e arte, que é a base de seu realismo. Ao separar a estética da religião nas obras de Dostoiévski, correse o risco de cair na incompreensão comum de certa crítica, que considerava que a desconstrução estética experimentada pelo artista não atingiu o núcleo fundamental do pensador religioso. Este artigo argumentará que a suspensão apofática que oferece o tom religioso às obras de Dostoiévski é o resultado de uma reconfiguração estética da religião à luz do niilismo e pode ser interpretada como um particular entrelaçamento entre o elemento estético-religioso que encontramos em Shakespeare e Cervantes e o núcleo da espiritualidade apofática do cristianismo oriental.

Palavras chave:Fiódor Dostoiévski, Teopoética, Teologia e Literatura Russa, Niilismo, Apofatismo.

Abstract
To interpret Dostoevsky’s thinking as a kind of apophatic method means to assume the impossibility of understanding it without first assuming the intrinsic connection between religion and art, which is the basis of his realism. By separating aesthetics from religion in Dostoevsky’s works, one runs the risk of falling into the common misunderstanding of a certain criticism which considered that the aesthetic deconstruction experienced by the artist did not reach the fundamental nucleus of the religious thinker. This paper will argue that the apophatic suspension wich offers the religious tone to Dostoevsky’s works is the result of a particular aesthetic reconfiguration of religion in the light of nihilism and can be interpreted as a particular interweaving between the aesthetic-religious elements found in Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the core of the apophatic spirituality of Eastern Christianity.

Keywords:Fiodor Dostoevsky, Theopoetic, Theology and Russian Literature, Nihilism, Apophaticism..

I

Religion and nihilism are key concepts in the constitution of Dostoevsky’s artistic universe. They have become ubiquitous in the philosophical and literary corpus of Russian intelligentsia of the second half of the 19th century. Nihilism, as an experience of «rupture of the traditional figure of the bond»2 is the phenomenon behind the thought and art of works as Fathers and Sons and The Brothers //Karamazov. The distinction between the naturalistic and scientific nihilisms of young radicals and the literary experience of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy sheds light on a kind of philosophical discernment that has given religious meaning to Russian literature. In Turgenev’s superfluous type of character, whose spiritual ancestry lies in Hamlet, there is an awareness of rootlessness and metaphysical orphanhood that could be interpreted as the starting point of a particular type of religious art. Inessa Medzhibovskaya’s observation that «the Russian superfluous man was the closest literary link to the literature of religious despair, and his deathbed confession the closest link to spiritual autobiography»3, serves here as an important starting point.

In his essay Hamlet and Don Quixote, Turgeniev described the formation of the modern subjectivity of his Russian contemporaries by using as reference Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s literary types. Hamlet, as a contemporary character, becomes the mirror of the modern condition and the spiritual source for the creation of an inner world. Turgeniev’s distance from the scientific naturalism of young nihilists gave way to a kind of subjectivity that rose above the emptiness and sterility found, for example, in Bazarov. The narrative of a self that embodies the egoism of Hamlet or the enthusiasm of Don Quixote translates an aesthetic experience displaced from the contents of a traditional religion, and indifferent to scientific and naturalist determinisms. Don Quixote’s faith in «something eternal and immutable» and Hamlet’s «selfishness and individualism» bear no relation to the traditional religious universe, and go beyond the limits of the world of science.

Turgenev’s depiction of reality offers a modern scenario of identity creation in which nihilism appears as the starting point of the configuration of the world. The fossilization of the traditional concept of God, the rootlessness caused by the loss of the sense of community, and the alienation of all sentiment of nature offered the creation of a reality, and of a self surrendered to the determinisms of a bourgeois world, which we find, for instance, in Balzac’s and Flaubert’s works. The increase of religious vocabulary in the 19th century Russian literature was due to the emergence of the tragic temperament which facilitated the return of a philosophical and religious grammar from the world of Shakespeare and Cervantes. The construction of a self that embodies elements of the «spirit of a northern [Hamlet], the spirit of reflection and analysis, a ponderous, gloomy spirit», or a “spirit of the southern individual [Quixote], bright, cheerful, naive»4 provided a kind of aesthetics of existence that faced the modern solitude and the hopeless orphanhood of the world. A degree of seriousness, which sought to face the ultimate consequences of nihilism, could be found in the aesthetics of Turgenev. His Hamlet, albeit being a selfish one who «cannot believe in himself», has an inflated ego.5 The aesthetic experience of self-construction found in his work could be related to what Elizabeth Allen called «secular salvation,» and what she sought to confront as «the loss of lasting psychological integration and consistent moral integrity.» Allen argues that «Turgeniev creates his own order and thereby espouses his own faith, a faith in aesthetic inventiveness that brings the only salvation Turgeniev can evision - secular salvation.»6

The interweaving of nihilism and aesthetics in Russian literature, and the creation of a modern religious grammar enabled a genuine expression of resistance to nihilism. The high seriousness of Anna Karenina when compared to Madame Bovary refers us to a kind of inner life which could not easily be found in the European novel. It was the literary expression of resistance to nihilism that could be found in Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s works.7 The lack of texture and substance of the ego subjected to the determinisms of the bourgeois life form, as seen in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the shattering of subjectivity provoked by scientific naturalism, the erasure of interiority due to the determinisms of social life (and the demonic narrowing of the soul, according to young Lukács) are faced in the works of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy without the gimmicks of a cynical reason, and a simple retreat to the traditional religion dogmas.

Oblomov’s laziness, similarly to Bartleby’s will, was imposed as a negative experience of a century which was characterized by its familiarity with nihilism. The superfluous Russian type represented a tense aesthetic form, which was the symptom of the rootlessness and the metaphysical orphanhood of the modern man. What is called religious consciousness in modern literature must be understood as the expression of a literary experience which sought to convey the reality of a modern ego devoid of substance. The uniqueness of Russian nihilism lies on a type of experience of negation of morality and of traditional religion, it is a form of apophaticism applied to a traditional understanding of being which signified the first sign of religious consciousness found in modern literature (as Tikhon says, “the complete atheist stands on the last step but one before perfect faith”). In this sense, the Russian nihilism should not be interpreted as a simple negation of religion, but as something that «represents its profound essence and dignity.»8 G. Florovsky had already emphasized the «wild emotional storm» of Russian nihilism, and interpreted that «psychologically it was a change of faith».9 Between What Is To Be Done (1863) and The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), in the 19th century Russia, a scenario filled with complex relations between religion, nihilism and art was seen. While Chernyshevsky acknowledged in science the last stop of his nihilism, Tolstoy followed his youthful intuition of creating a new religion devoid of dogmas and mysticism. The definition of art as «the spiritual organ of human life» found in What is Art10 is the result of a particular aesthetic reconfiguration of religion in the light of nihilism, and of a deconstruction of the traditional concepts of religion enclosed in the ideas of God and Revelation.

II

In his first speech in homage to Dostoevsky, Soloviev stated that modern art, which has detached itself from religion, should establish a new and free attachment with the latter. Thus, not only would the religious idea master the artist, but they themselves would also master the religious idea. V. Ivanov, in his Freedom and the Tragic Life, certainly had this idea in mind when he characterized Dostoevsky as a theurgist, «a creator of myth.» The conception of a religion rooted in the consciousness of the artist, as found, for example, in Holderlin’s poetics, can easily be applied to the literary mythologization seen in Dostoevsky’s works. Unlike a traditional religious consciousness which claims a specific revelation, understood as the Sacred Scriptures or Church, the modern religious consciousness is characterized by its sacralization of an ideal or by its exercise of aesthetic rootedness particularly in the spirit of a people. Both forms, in addition to serving as models for the understanding of Dostoevsky’s religious aesthetics, are characterized by the contingency and the transience of an object which lacks transcendental locus.

Religious consciousness is always the consciousness of something, and, as far as the religious consciousness of the modern Russian literature is concerned, it has been characterized by its particular insight into nihilism. Dostoevsky’s perception that «there was no sense in asking about the origins of nihilism in Russia because everyone was nihilistic»11 should be interpreted in the light of what Mikhail Epstein recognized as the «dark and unhealthy side of apophaticism.»12 The sense of apophaticism must be interpreted here as a form of nihilism which assumed all the consequences of the event named by Nietzsche as the death of God. The theological provenance of Russian nihilism, and the apophatic substance of its form of «negation,» which was considered by Grigoriev in his review of Tolstoy as «the methods of our time,»13 will not be analyzed here. The type of religious consciousness found in Dostoevsky, the radicality of his apophasticism, and how he set up a nihilistic religious aesthetic that made possible the existence of an anti-nihilistic literary experience shall be focus.

Although the rapprochement between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in the 20th century was exalted, the affinity between the complete insight into nihilism, and the role of art towards the latter are clear and unavoidable. The diagnosis of European culture in Winter Notes, and the untimely description of nihilism in Notes from Underground present a philosophical insight into European nihilism, and a spiritual understanding of art found in Dostoevsky’s letter to Apollon Maykov in December 1868.

“I have absolutely different notions of reality and realism from what our realists and critics do. My idealism is more real than theirs. Lord! If one tells the story sensibly of what we Russians have been through the last ten years in our spiritual development – won’t the realists in fact yell that it’s a fantasy! And meanwhile it is original, real realism! That in fact is what realism is, only deeper, but with them it’s shallow sailing. Well isn’t Lyubim Tortsov in essency paltry – and after all, that’s all of the ideal that their realism had allowed itself. Profound realism indeed! With their realism you can’t explain a hundredth part of real, actually occurring facts”14

Dostoevsky’s reality has an apophatic dimension which has considered the scientific contours of modern realism as superficial. His «profound realism,» a modern type of apophasticism that created transcendence, must be interpreted as the expression of his nihilism and, at the same time, as the possibility of an anti-nihilist literary experience. The reduction of reality to the contours of modern scientism, the determination of subjectivity by materialism and utilitarianism, and the definition of morality and religion based on the projections and aspirations of a bourgeois weltanschauung (my idea is to become as rich as Rothschilds)15 experienced a radical suspension in the whole of his literary work. The antinomy of an agonized and unfounded world provides a reality with no fixed points, in which the «traditional figures of the bond» [Religion, Humanism, Science] are incapable of establishing any value. Isaiah Berlin’s portrait of Dostoevsky offers one of the most complete and illustrative images of his apophasticism.

I realize that he is a great genius, but I don’t find his philosophy of life very sympathetic, it’s too religious for me, and too clerical. Besides, when I read Dostoevsky I become unnerved – he can completely dominate one. One suddenly finds oneself in a nightmare, one’s world becomes obsessive, turns into something sinister, one wants to escape from it. I don’t want to write about that. It’s too strong, too dark, too terrifying, for me. I am hopelessly secular. It is the kind of Christianity where saintliness borders on madness. [...] Kafka is more sympathetic. He is more realistic. […] Dostoevsky is like a magnifying glass. If you hold a magnifying glass over a piece of paper in the light, it scorches it. The paper becomes distorted. That’s what Dostoevsky does to reality.16

What Berlin regarded as a distortion of reality can be interpreted as an experience of apophatic suspension of the positivity of the world. Sir Isaiah’s resistance to Dostoevsky’s antinomian realism is similar to Tolstoy’s opinion in relation to Shakespeare’s worlds, in which «all is erratic, inflated, unnatural, and violates the unity of the character.» The negative suspension of their realism promotes a deconstruction of the «traditional figures of the bond,» thus, creating a distortion, «like a magnifying glass» of the positive world spaces imprinted on modern reality. As a sort of apophatic suspension of modern reality, Dostoevsky promoted a deconstruction of the main positive configurations which offered unity to the world of his contemporaries: the vulgarity of the scientific materialism, the insignificance of the traditional religion, and the exercises of returning to some type of romantic naturalistic truth.

To interpret Dostoevsky’s thinking as a kind of apophatic method means to assume the impossibility of understanding it without first assuming the intrinsic connection between religion and art, which is the basis of his realism. While describing perfectly the meaning of reality for Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Jackson can be used here as a good example of criticism that accomplishes this separation. In an article that seeks to establish the relations between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Jackson considered that,

reality for Dostoevsky Always is pregnant with an inner truth, a poetry that can at any moment suddenly make itself felt (and suddenly is one of his favorite words); a poetry that in spiritual-religious terms is revelation but in purely aesthetic terms for Dostoevsky means a triumph over naturalistic surface reality, a disclosure of the rich but usually masked interiority of man and human reality17.

For Jackson, Dostoevsky’s definition of reality experiences a kind of «phenomenological epoché» avant la lettre, a «triumph over naturalistic surface reality,» a distance taken, as Husserl wanted, from naive natural validations. This understanding accurately identifies Dostoevsky’s opinion on a realism that is incapable of «explaining a hundred part of real,»18 and sheds light on his attempt to formulate an aesthetic which sought to distinguish the religious substance from the nihilism that determined the psychological types of his time. Although Jackson described with rare mastery the definition of reality in Dostoevsky’s work, one notes in his analysis a misconception that ignores how the relation between art and religion is constituted in the author’s corpus. The distinction between «spiritual-religious terms» and «purely aesthetic terms» does not consider the nature of the concept of religion and the romantic filters that determined the appearance of the concept in Dostoevsky’s work. Dostoevsky’s realism corresponds to an experience of mutual penetration of religion and aesthetics, thus, being impossible to distinguish between the two concepts in the architecture of his thought and work. To consider religion and art as two distinct realities reproduces a misconception about the nature of religion and its role in the experience of overcoming nihilism in Dostoevsky’s literature. Jackson’s understanding of a «poetry that in spiritual-religious terms is revelation» cancels the potency of a religious aesthetic by subjecting it to the fixed content of a traditional religion. The idea that there is a religious principle uncontaminated by aesthetics, and that this principle could be identified with the classic concept of the revelation of Christianity does not find support in the architecture of Dostoyevsky’s work. His realism must not be interpreted as a sort of negative propaedeutic which points dialectically to a redemption that would take place within the positive frameworks of a traditional type of religion.

The apophatic suspension which offers the religious tone to Dostoevsky’s works does not reproduce the classical schemes of a negative theology that preserves the metaphysical foundation interpreted by traditional theology, such as God, revelation or principle. By separating aesthetics from religion in Dostoevsky’s works, one runs the risk of falling into the common misunderstanding of a certain criticism which considered that the aesthetic deconstruction experienced by the artist did not reach the fundamental nucleus of the religious thinker. The idea of revelation in Dostoevsky can be interpreted as a particular interweaving between the aesthetic-religious elements, as found in Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the core of the apophatic spirituality of Eastern Christianity. In his Anatheism, Richard Kearney offers a good starting point for thinking about the relation between Shakespeare’s poetics and the apophatic mysticism that, as it has been already argued, finds a clear correspondence in Dostoevsky’s. Kearney mentions John Keats’s «negative capability» as the articulation of a poetic suspension, especially present in Shakespeare, that would be «the ability to be ‘in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable attainment after fact and reason.» Kearney argued that «there is a thin line, I suspect, separating Keats’s formula of literary agnosticism from the analogous moves of apophatic mysticism in theology or the methodic suspension of accredited certainties in philosophy.”19

III

The meaning and rediscovery of the grammar of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the enthusiasm with which Dostoevsky received the essay of Turgenev sheds light on the constitution of religious vocabulary in the Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century. The negativity of a consciousness fueled by the power of Hamlet’s ego, and the enthusiasm and sanctity of Don Quixote’s ideal can be interpreted as the modern Loci Theologici on which the religious aesthetics of Dostoevsky’s novels have been composed. The definition of art as «the highest expression of religious consciousness,» found in Tolstoy’s eccentric treatise, can be applied to Dostoevsky’s effort to find a moral and religious principle that could respond to the challenges posed by his time. The characters met in the first lines of The Idiot are inside a high-speed train and represent the modern sign of a time that has seen the erosion of all attachments to traditional values. According to Mishkin, “the men of those days they were absolutely not the same people that we are now; it was not the same race as now, in our age, really, it seems we are different species… In those days they were men of one idea, but now we are more nervous, more developed, more sensitive; men capable of two or three ideas at once… Modern men are broader-minded.”

The theological projections, as well as the critical fortune that placed Dostoevsky within the margins of a traditional type of religion, were mistaken for not taking under consideration the secular character of their sources, and the aesthetic dimension of their spiritual development. In Dostoevsky’s work an interlocution with the traditional universe of Christianity capable of elevating it to a stature of dignity could not be found. In its dogmatic form and within its institutional frameworks, Christianity is absent from Dostoevsky’s work, and its existence is contemplated through a latent indifference that makes it disappear along with the historical insignificance of all orthodoxies and their place in the modern world in motion. There is no art subjected to theological contents, and the type of religion seen in his narrative originates from the aesthetic elaboration of an experience displaced from the formal tradition of Christian orthodoxy. The concept of revelation in Dostoevsky’s work, which shall be developed at another time, can be interpreted as a trace, word which has the meaning given by J. Derrida: «the trace is not a presence but rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace.”20 Criticism of the heteronomous function, and of the perverse dimension of institutional religion made Dostoevsky a sharp opponent of Roman Catholicism. In addition, it is quite significant that an intelligentsia of the Catholic Christianity like Romano Guardini, in his reading of The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, opposed the antinomic presence of the figure of Christ, and promoted a retreat from Christianity to the «average possibilities of the Christian fact», which, for Guardini, ends in the «Church». His assessment of Ivan’s legend as a «blasphemy,»21 differently from Alyloch, who saw it as a praise of Christ, appeared as a retreat from the unbreathable universe found in Dostoevsky’s religion, thus, being favorable to the Christianity subjected to what Nicolas Berdiaev’s existentialism considered as «patrimonial heritage».

The misconception of reading Dostoyevsky through the lenses of a theological hermeneutics of Christianity, be it Orthodox, Protestant or Catholic, is at risk of displacing the author of his explicit experience of metaphysical, ontological, and social orphanhood, which will be the intimate nature of a literary activity constituted under the auspices of nihilism. Lukács’ intuitions in his The Theory of the Novel is known to be originated from his frustrated attempt to write a book on Dostoevsky, according to his letter to the poet Paul Ernst in August 1915: «I have already given up my Dostoevsky book; it has become too big a project. Out of it emerged a large-scale essay, called The Aesthetic of the Novel.»22 The novel, as an «Epic in a world without God», according to Lukacs’ thesis, contemplates a condition which could be compared to what Lucien Goldmann called «tragic vision». It results from the loss of meaning of the «idea of God,» and loss of the «notion of community» that has overcome the modern world. As an expression of a “mature virility”, the modern novel exhales an awareness of the triviality of social life in a world devoid of any divine trace, and subjected to what Dostoevsky might call the “transcendent principle of money.”2323

The elective affinities which shaped Dostoevsky’s novels belong to the canonical pantheon of the modern West, being, thus, within a philosophical-religious and literary arc composed of the figures of Hamlet and Don Quixote. The birth of these aesthetic types points to a time when men and world are devoid of a transcendent meaning. According to Lukács, Don Quixote, the

«first great novel of world literature stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere; when the world, released from its paradoxical anchorage in a beyond that is truly present, was abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness.»24

Therefore, a particular type of religious art, not a traditional form of religion, becomes the discernment space of an interiority that faces “the prosaic vulgarity of outward life”.25 The meaning of Shakespeare and Cervantes in Dostoevsky’s work must be interpreted as the necessary substance for the creation of a particular type of religious aesthetics.26 The rise of the novel, as done by Lukács, the epic of an era in which the extensive totality of life is no longer given as evident, helps us understand the place of art in the constitution of Dostoevsky’s inner world. In his Diary of a Writer, from 1876, Dostoevsky makes an important confession of the meaning of Don Quixote for the composition of the principles of his religious aesthetics. «This is so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought; and if the world were to come to an end, and people were asked there, somewhere: ‘Did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusion have you drawn from it?’ – men could silently hand over Don Quixote: ‘such is my inference from life. Can you condemn me for it?’

—

Bibliography

Allen, E. Beyond Realism: Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation, Stanford University Press, 1992.  

 Badiou, A. Manifesto for Philosophy. State University of New York, 1999.

 Berdiaev, N. Dostoievsky. Sheed & Ward Inc, New York, 1934.

Derrida, J. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Northwestern, 1973.

 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Complete Letters: 1868-1871 ... Editors, David Allan Lowe, Ronald Meyer. V. III. Ardis, 1990.

 ___________. Writer’s Diary. Northwestern University Press, 1994.

 ___________. Winter notes on summer impressions. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

 ___________. The Brothers Karamazov. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

___________. The Idiot. New York, Dover Publications, Inc, 2013.

 Clement, O. Le visage intérieur. Stock, Paris, 1978.

 Desseille, P. La spiritualité orthodoxe et la philocalie, Placide Deseille, 1997.

 Epstein, M. Genis, A. Vladiv-Glover, S. Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. New York, Berghahn Books, 1999.

 Florovsky, G. Theology and literature. Collected Works of Georges Florovsky: Volume 11, Nordland Publishing Company, 1972.

Guardini, R. L’univers religieux de Dostoïevski. Paris: Ed. Du Seuil, 1947.

 Jackson, R.L. Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions. Stanford University Press: Stanford California, 1992.  

Jones, M. Dostoevsky and the dynamics of religious experience, Anthem Press, 2005.  

 Pattison, G; Thompson, D. Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Kearney, R. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Columbia University Press, 2011.

 Kostalevsky, M. Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

 Lukács, G. Selected Correspondence (1902-1920). Edited by Judith Markus and Zaltan Tar. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986

 ___________. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. 1983.

 Mc Reynolds, S. Dostoevsky Studies (13), Dostoevsky and Christianity, Attempto, 2009.

___________. Dostoevsky in Europe: the political as the spiritual. Partisan Review. 69.1 (Winter 2002).

 Mikhailovsky, N.K. A Cruel Talent. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1978.

Medzhibovskaya, I. Tolstoy and the religious culture of his time. A biography of a long conversion, 1845-1887. New York, 2008.

 Soloviev, V. The Heart of Reality, University of Notre Dame, 2003.

 Tolstoy, L. What I Believe: My Religion, The Free Age Press, 1902.

 ___________. What is Art, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1996.

___________. Tolstoy on Shakespeare. A critical Essay on Shakespeare. New York & London, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906

 Turgeniev, I. The Essential Turgenev, Evanston, Northwestern, 1994.

Venturi, F. Roots of Revolution. A History of the Populist And Socialist Movements In Nineteenth Century Russia, Alfred A Knopf, 1960.

 Ziolkowski, E. The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest. University Park: Penn State Press, 1991

—

Notas

[1] This paper has been written during my time as a Visiting Scholar at Boston College (JanuaryJuly 2018). I am grateful to professor Dr. Maxim Shrayer, and to the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages and Literatures, where I spent a fruitful semester.

[2]Badiou, A. Manifesto for Philosophy, p.55.

[3]Medzhibovskaya, I. Tolstoy and the religious culture of his time, p.63.

[4]Turgeniev, The essential Turgenev, p.558

[5]Ibid, p.550

[6]Elizabeth Allen, Beyond Realism, p.54

[7]According to Orwin, “Turgueniev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy all share this complex attitude toward subjectivity; it affects every aspect of Russian psychological realism. The self that Russian realists construct is made up of matter not visible under a microscope, and we confirm its existence only because we feel its motive power in ourselves”. Donna Tussing Orwin, Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Stanford University Press, 2007, p.10

[8]Epstein, M. Post-Atheism: From Apophatic Theology to “Minimal Religion”. In New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, p.355

[9]Florovsky, G. Theology and Literature, p.14

[10]Tolstoy, L. What is Art, p.171

[11]Florovsky, G. Theology and Literature, p.26

[12]Epstein, M. Post-Atheism, p.351

[13]Grigoryev stated that “he has only one thing in common with the methods of our time – negation. But negation of what? Of everything borrowed and assumed in our false development. Cut off from his native soil by birth and upbringing, he tries through negation to dig down to his roots, the simple basis, the primary causes. He is not content like Turgenev with looking reverentially from afar at the soil». In. Knowles, A V. Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage. Boston, Redwood Burn, 1978, p.69-70.

[14]Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, v.3, p.114

[15]Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, p.78.

[16]Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, Halban Publishers, London, 2011

[17]Jackson, R L. Dialogues with Dostoevsky, p.240.

[18]Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, p.114.

[19]Kearney, R. Anatheism, p.11

[20]Derrida, J. Speech and Phenomena, p.176

[21]Guardini, R. L’univers Religieux de Dostoïevski, p. 135.

[22]Lukács, G. Selected correspondence 1902-1920, p. 252.

[23]Malcon Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience, p.69

[24]Lukács, Theory of Novel, p.103.