“Man without quotes” and “gentleman with a mocking face” in the “Crystal Palace”: Concerning A.A. Borovoy’s unpublished manuscript, “Dostoevsky”

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the world’s interest in the work of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was growing. It was becoming clear that his writing contained - if not answers, then key questions for that time, and that Dostoevsky was not only a writer, but also a philosopher, and that it was impossible to understand the catastrophic experience of the present without recourse to his ideas. Important studies published by, amongst others, L.I. Shestov, N.A. Berdyaev, V.V. Rozanov, N.O. Lossky, D.S. Merezhkovsky, and M.M. Bakhtin reflected a growing “existentialist” trend in philosophy inspired by his work. However, subsequently, in the early years of the USSR, emerging totalitarianism initiated an ideological campaign casting this “reactionary” writer as the progenitor of “Dostoevshchina.” Dostoevsky’s ideas were then addressed, mainly, by emigre religious thinkers living in exile from Russia. As for the Soviet Union, there Communist Party overseers of culture denounced Dostoevsky, creating a caricatural image of a clerical and anti-revolutionary, semi-forbidden writer (this caricatured image—with the opposite evaluative sign, served its purposes).