5 - Dostoevsky in the prism of the orthodox semiosphere

Summary

One of the most astute and enlightened Orthodox readers of Dostoevsky wrote of him in the 1930s:

Dostoevsky dreamt of Russian socialism, but what he saw was a ‘Russian monk’. And that monk had neither the intention nor the wish to build ‘world harmony’ he was in no way a builder within the historical process. It is clear, therefore, <…> that Dostoevsky's dream did not coincide with Dostoevsky's vision. Dostoevsky's place in the history of Russian philosophy belongs to him not because he worked out a philosophical system, but because he opened up and deepened actual metaphysical experience <…> and Dostoevsky shows more than he argues.

To read Dostoevsky religiously it is not ‘necessary to put everything in its proper place so that everything can be reconciled’ as, according to Sergei Averintsev, the Neo-Thomist ‘theology of art’ tends to do. Dostoevsky is no Dante, but a nineteenth-century writer whose ‘dreams’ are influenced not by Christian theology but by secular European Utopianism and Romanticism, though his vision and his ‘metaphysical experience’ are Christian and, indeed, in many ways specifically Russian Orthodox Christian. One can only accept these contradictions, and work from within the paradox.

Most great art reflects the world as chaos and this is particularly evident in Russian art. Dostoevsky, in his novels, reflects religious dereliction and aspiration and is capable of ‘showing’ profound insights, ‘metaphysical experience’, even Grace, but these are seen from within ‘the sphere of our sorrows’, glimpses not to be reassembled according to any all-embracing concept of hierarchy and order. In his notebooks for 1880–81, Dostoevsky speaks of his ‘Hosannah’, having passed through a furnace of doubt (27,86).