The economic crisis has created a basically new situation. Russia should reduce its geopolitical ambitions, which have emerged in the last few years, as well as its national budget. The illusions of might, based on the possession of expensive commodities that everyone needs, are fading. There is no doubt that in a couple of years the demand for energy resources will grow again. But until then, Russia will have to go through another period of difficulties, whose outcome is not clear. (...) Depending on its outcome, Putin's epoch will be viewed either as a time of lost opportunities, or as the eve of a real revival of Russia as a modern great power. (shrink)

Faith, Tsar and Fatherland is an exploration of how religious, political, and ethnic differences influenced war mobilization in Russia prior to, and during, the First World War. Through the narrative of a sacred union, the Russian Imperial government unified an otherwise divided country into one cohesive whole, fighting to protect the Fatherland. In the name of patriotism, historically marginalized groups such as Russo-German settlers and Russian Muslims set aside political, religious, and cultural differences to fight alongside ethnic Russians in (...) one unified effort to defeat the Central Powers. (shrink)

The article provides a summary of “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and European Culture” International Scientific Online Conference, held by the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian-European Intellectual Dialogue of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in cooperation with the Dostoevsky’s Moscow House Museum Center. At the conference, leading experts in various fields of the humanities presented various reports on the mutual influence of Dostoevsky and European culture. Research attention was paid to the problem of the influence of (...) the Russian writer on the creative development of European philosophical and artistic thought. The speakers demonstrated the history of translations of Dostoevsky’s novels into foreign languages. The participants of the conference also reflected the influence of the concepts of Western European philosophy, literature, and culture on the fiction and religious thought of the writer. A number of conference reports were devoted to the cultural and philosophical problems of Dostoevsky’s works. The researchers examined the religious and philosophical dialogues of the novel Demons, paying special attention to the controversial image of the protagonist of the novel – Nikolai Stavrogin. Leading Dostoyevsky specialists turned to the littlestudied aspects of his journalism, defining the role of the “Jewish question.” The conference presented literary critics’ interpretations of Dostoevsky’s novels, the history of screen and musical adaptations of his works in European and Russian art. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article deals with Dostoevsky’s controversial concept of love and its relation to that of Nietzsche. Despite many parallels, Dostoevsky’s thought on love can be viewed as a criticism, avant la letter, of Nietzsche’s claim to having unmasked the Christian idea of neighbour-love ‘for God’s sake’ as an illusion. Yet, in addition to neighbour-love, Dostoevsky also entertains the idea of ‘furthest love’, love for the Übermensch of the future. The article examines Dostoevsky’s experiments with love’s different forms and argues that (...) the question underlying these explorations is whether Christian love can positively impact the world or whether it is doomed to be ineffectual, even destructive. It is argued that, while Dostoevsky’s novels often expose love’s fallibility and even its impotence, they nonetheless manifest the quest for a love capable of redeeming the world. It is shown how Dostoevsky considered one’s understanding of love to hinge on anthropological views, such as belief in the immortality of the soul or the degree of human freedom and responsibility; and how the reality and practice of love, in turn, influences both who we are and understand ourselves to be.​. (shrink)

Hantés par la fameuse phrase de Levinas, selon laquelle«s’interroger sur l’identité juive, c’est déjà l’avoir perdue», certains penseurs de la fin du XXe siècle et du début du suivant évoquent un temps béni où nul ne se demandait qui était juif et qui ne l’était pas, si on l’était vraiment, ce que c’était donc que de l’être ; un âge d’or perdu – comme tout âge d’or – où les Juifs ne bénéficiaient certes pas des mêmes droits que les autres (...) habitants du pays, et étaient contraints de vivre da... (shrink)

The paper discusses Dostoevsky’s insight into the oxymoronic metaphysics of the Russian revolution. The keys to it are contained in two of Dostoevsky’s works. The first is Demons with Kirillov’s idea of self-deification in death intended to fill the gap left by the proclaimed absence of God. The second is Notes from the House of the Dead, where Dostoevsky depicts the Russian peasants as people for whom even such notions as freedom, happiness and honor are expressed in monetary terms. The (...) Russian revolution was created by people of Kirillov’s persuasion; yet this ideal was offered to people whose teleology was firmly rooted in the earthly life. The interpenetration of these worldviews resulted in the initial victory of the revolution, but the dominance of the peasant Weltanschauung with its earthly teleology ultimately led to the collapse of the communist project a few decades later. (shrink)

This article compares the works of Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as interpreted by the philosopher Lev Shestov. The author shows how Shestov analyzes Anna Karenina and War and Peace in light of...

The article examines the historiosophical reflections of F. I. Tyutchev, presented in his treatises, letters, poems, and substantiates the idea that Tyutchev does not proclaim slogans of either Slavophil or Westernist doctrines, but creates an original imperial ideology. Tyutchev views Russia as an equal and integral part of Europe, linking the existence of the empire with the development of the European spirit in Russia. The main criterion for the existence of the empire is unity. If it does not exist, then (...) the state as an empire cannot exist. Tyutchev treated Orthodoxy as a historiosophical category. He bases his concept of the historical process on the traditions of Eastern Christianity and the legacy of the Byzantine Empire. In the idea of an empire based on Christian principles, Tyutchev sees the best system of statehood. For Tyutchev, the Russian people and Orthodoxy play a major role in the transformation of the world. In the concept of state and power, the categories of Christian ethics are especially important for Tyutchev, which, in his opinion, were not really relevant for the upper strata of society and representatives of the Russian government. The poet calls power "godless", claiming that it does not come from God, but is based on its material power, without recognizing a higher Divine authority over itself. The reason for the "godlessness" of the authorities was the separation from the Russian people and their national traditions and the departure from the historical past of "Holy Russia". This, from Tyutchev's point of view, is the main existential problem of Russia. Tyutchev's concept of empire was not a reproduction of the realities of the political life of Russia in the XIX century, but was an attempt to answer how the state should be built. Tyutchev's ideal of the Russian state is based on a society united by a single Christian faith. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the unique role of the Russian philosophical tradition in the formation of an individual’s self-consciousness and attempts to overcome the limitati...

In his book Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, Peter J. Conradi suggests that “a task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious coexistence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevski.”1 In his 1986 essay “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” Conradi goes even further to argue that Fyodor Dostoevsky has been “unnoticed by commentators, a hovering or brooding presence (...) for at least two decades.”2 Both here and in his book Fyodor Dostoevsky, Conradi demonstrates “convergence” through a number of remarkable similarities: the parallels between Dostoevsky’s holy... (shrink)

Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was one of the involuntary emigrants of 1922.1 He became particularly well known in the Federal Republic of Germany through his autobiographical writings, which for him were a form not only of remembering, but also of philosophizing. The first section of this article is devoted to the topic of “Community and totalitarianism.” In various works in the 1920s and 1930s Stepun sought to identify the mental causes of Europe and Russia’s precipitous decent into totalitarianism. He saw (...) these in the demonic absolutizing of one-sided worldviews as a primary factor. The counter-model for him was the concept of “all-unity,” as can already be found in Vladimir Solovyov. The second section is dedicated to the context of “Dialogue and culture.” Dialogicity is always the opposite of totalitarianism and is also founded in the concept of “all-unity.” The concluding section, entitled “Experiencing and remembering,” is devoted to Stepun’s autobiographical writings and his notion of “experiencing” (perezhivanie). (shrink)

The paper discusses the perception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work by Yuly Aykhenvald (1872–1928), a famous literary critic of the first quarter of the twentieth century. It shows that Aykhenvald’s attitude toward Dostoevsky had undergone a certain evolution from a rejection via demands to “overcome” him to his recognition as one of the “spiritual leaders” of the thinking Russia alongside Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy. Yet Aykhenvald still had some controversy with Dostoevsky, above all over philosophy of history. The ques­tion of (...) Russia’s destiny and its relation to the West is addressed by Aykhenvald following the same algorithm that is used in the article by Thomas G. Masaryk (to which Aykhen­vald was reacting), namely through the prism of and in dispute with Dostoevsky. The pa­per proves that Aykhenvald focuses not on interpreting or analyzing Masaryk’s ideas, but on refuting the views of the Eurasianists and that Eurasian ideas are the very philosophi­cal context that serves as a background for his argument with Dostoevsky. In refuting Dostoevsky’s views on Europe and justifying his own historiosophic view of the entire world as a unified Europe, Aykhenvald eventually comes to the paradox that Dostoevsky, being the “denier of Europe”, is the “intercultural cross-link” that ties Europe and Russia even more closely together. In this way, Dostoevsky’s work turns out to be a starting point for Aykhenvald’s own historiosophic framework, which brings him closer to both Russian interpreters of the Silver Age (Vikentii V. Veresaev) and the European philosoph­ical and political tradition (Thomas G. Masaryk). (shrink)

The article discusses the characterization of the visualization of visible reality in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The author suggests that semiotic and legal analysis should be used to understand the meaning of the color code of the novel. Semiotic discourse reduces the ambiguity, uncertainty, and expression of the color code to a conscious, discrete, and conditioned meaning of individual colors. Legal analysis helps to better understand the main idea and other aspects of the novel, encoded in colors. (...) Psychological, personal associations, and symbolic methods are used to reveal direct and indirect meaning of the colors used by Dostoyevsky. The basic characterization of colors proposed by Goethe is employed as a key for color decoding. The article also establishes the correlation of the color code of the novel with the colors of the flags of the Russian Empire and the German Confederation. The message and meaning of the same colors of these national flags are contrasted. The interpretation is complemented by the author’s drawings, which enable to visualize the color code that stores and transmits information about national identity. (shrink)

The relation between aisthesis and interiority manifests in Wittgenstein’s account of the subject and his private language argument. But it is also an overlooked leitmotif in Dostoevsky’s novels—one of Wittgenstein’s favorite authors, and in W.G. Sebald’s work—who was inspired by Wittgenstein’s philosophy. This book reflects on the role literature can play in answering the philosophical question of an adequate presentation of intention and pain.

The article surveys various potential sources for Dostoevsky’s knowledge of the Faust legend, examines a range of arts, from literature to music, and focuses on the novel of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger as an important influence for Dostoevsky as the writer interacts with Faustian themes in The Brothers Karamazov on both literary and meta-literary levels. Klinger’s novel is considered in terms of the problems of epistemology and the limits of human cognition, problems rooted in finiteness as a defining characteristic of human (...) nature. In the literary worlds of Klinger and Dostoevsky, the attempts to establish limited human cognition as unlimited, essentially divine, and capable of grasping the entire picture of the existence of both the individual human being and humanity as a whole cause unforeseen and tragic consequences. The article treats the Faustian musical scene in The Adolescent as a variation on the relevant scene in Gounod’s Faust, exploring similar epistemological problems. The article claims that Dostoevsky grants his characters and readers the same degree of freedom in exploring the nature of their cognitive processes and in choosing the voice they decide to listen to and follow. (shrink)

A MAN IS FREE AS HE IS THE IMAGE OF GODLY FREEDOM. FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT FREEDOM. The article presents Fyodor Dostoevsky’s considerations of freedom based on both The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. The writer shows, that dealing with own freedom is one of the greatest tasks in human life and man's future fate depends wholly on how he copes with this task. Freedom is a fundamental concept in a philosophical anthropology of the Russian novelist. According (...) to his grasp of the problem of evil this is a man, who appears the source of all misery, which he brings upon himself, among which not atheism but false understanding of God is the greatest one. (shrink)