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3 Introduction The path up and down is one and the same. —Heraclitus APPROACHES TO DOSTOEVSKY For Dostoevsky, the problem of sin is central, vital, and twofold. While raising the most fundamental questions about human nature, Dostoevsky tends to give contradictory sets of answers. On the one hand, his work epitomizes the idea that people are inherently good since they are created in the image of God. Even when they question the existence of divine law, rebel against the very idea of sin, and commit crimes for either egotistical reasons or for the sake of humanity, deep inside themselves they remain conscious of having transgressed moral law and feel remorse. The intensity of this remorse may vary from one character to another, but many find themselves unable to endure the burden and come to realize the necessity of repentance. This side of Dostoevsky’s philosophy is optimistic and bright; it is a philosophy of hope. On the other hand, the writer is famous for the “darker side” of his art, for what Russians call dostoevshchina—the gloomy aspect of the human soul, a contradictory mode of thinking and feeling, those shady depths of the human psyche where good intentions turn into evil, love into hatred, and beauty inspires a desire to corrupt. Dostoevsky’s double vision has attracted the attention of readers, critics, and scholars ever since he began to publish his works. Starting in the early twentieth century, the problem of the coexistence of the brighter and darker aspects in Dostoevsky was identified from three major perspectives, all of which retain their relevance in Dostoevsky studies today. 1. The first tradition, prominent in the writings of twentieth-century Russian religious thinkers, emphasizes the brighter, revelatory, and epiphanic sides of Dostoevsky. This tradition originated in Dmitry Merezhkovsky ’s Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (1901–2) and Nicholas Lossky’s Dostoevsky and His Christian Understanding of the World (1944).1 In the past two decades, this affirmative spirit has predominated in Russian scholarship: in works by Tatiana Kasatkina, Boris Tikhomirov, Anastasia Gacheva, Ivan Esaulov, and Introduction 4 many others. Among recent Western studies, such a perspective is endorsed by James Scanlan in his Dostoevsky the Thinker (2002). Scanlan regards Dostoevsky as a Christian thinker whose religious convictions were sturdy and consistent and in whose works a dominant voice advocating goodness, justice, and love is always foregrounded. If the writer gives voice to darker forces, this is part of his larger strategy to prove these voices erroneous and ill fated: he “always kept his sights on the opposite of what he believed and sought to establish his own positions by demonstrating the failure of their antitheses.”2 According to Scanlan’s view, there is no reason to assume that Dostoevsky shared the ideas of all his characters. “For all his attention to opposing ideas,” he writes, “Dostoevsky did not spend his life torn between conflicting possibilities. He depicted such tension in his fiction for dramatic purposes, but his other writings provide unambiguous indications of which side he was on.”3 2. Members of the second camp focus on the conflict between Dostoevsky ’s brighter and darker sides. They emphasize that the world, as Dostoevsky presents it, is full of contradictions and that aspects of this contradictory whole are irreconcilable. This tradition also goes back to the Russian religious renaissance of the early twentieth century. Among the very first publications on this issue were essays by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Sergei Bulgakov , timed to coincide with the staging of Dostoevsky’s novel Demons at the Moscow Art Theater (MKHAT) in 1914.4 Ivanov and Bulgakov stressed that Dostoevsky’s portrayal of human nature had tragic overtones because of his belief that human consciousness was fragmented, the human soul was split in two, and faith in God always coexisted with doubt and disbelief . Ivanov saw Dostoevsky’s contradictions as irresolvable. In a later version of his essay “Dostoevskii i roman-tragediia” (“Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy,” 1916), Ivanov concludes that all of Dostoevsky’s novels are predominantly tragedies in both form and content.5 In the words of Steven Cassedy, the author of Dostoevsky’s Religion (2005), this pessimistic flavor in an otherwise sanguine view of the writer’s philosophy is attributed to the fact that “by the turn of the century Russian intellectual life had been thoroughly infected with the Nietzsche bacillus.”6 He maintains that Russian religious thinkers’ approach to Dostoevsky was biased because they considered his and Nietzsche’s ideas completely compatible. Philosophers of...

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