Dostoevsky as an Artist of the Godless World

Abstract

Article off ers an unconventional view of Dostoevsky as an artist of the godless world. The author separates Dostoevsky’s Christian worldview from the artistic image of the world he created in his works. In Dostoevsky’s imaginative world, Christianity is only a dream and hope, which is not manifested in real life. While only a few of his characters are focused on it, the absolute majority live their lives as if Christ never existed. The Christian dimension transcends the godless world created by Dostoevsky, only occasionally touching it from the outside as a kind of revelation. The external in this world must be overcome by the internal, which is only possible if one experiences this “external” within themselves, with all its sins and temptations. Dostoevsky’s world is therefore even more godless and frightening than the world in which he had actually lived. Which is also in the nature of things, because the only way to defeat it is by reaching the last satanic depths. Dostoevsky’s texts were originally addressed to secular people, to the religiously ignorant intelligentsia, as opposed to devout Christians. This fact also determines the perception of Dostoevsky’s works by diff erent types of readers. The author proposes a new classifi cation of types Dostoevsky’s readers belong to. The article introduces the concept of a “gnostic myth” about Dostoevsky, the emergence of which is characteristic of modern intellectuals. The historical context of the appearance of the Dostoevsky phenomenon is that Dostoevsky himself was a phenomenon of a traditional person living in conditions of a secular civilization of the modern era. Formed by a millennium of Russian Christian culture, Dostoevsky had been thrown into the godless intellectual world of the 19th century. This godless world, prophetically shown by Dostoevsky, is the world of the 21st century, which he had already envisioned in the 19th century, and this insight into the “new” world ruled by “demons” anticipated the genre of “dystopia” and is in fact his main artistic achievement.