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The greatness of Dostoevsky lies in the fact that, even speaking as a religious philosopher-thinker, he never remains at the mercy of abstract ideas and does not invite the reader to enter with him into the realm of faith, revelation and sacraments. He is haunted by the evil that reigns in the world. He often has to argue with himself.

Then we need to turn to his last novel, the final novel, to The Brothers Karamazov, and to his journalistic speech, to his famous speech about Pushkin, his dying confession to his readers. The publication of the novel was completed in the eleventh book of the Russian Messenger magazine for 1880, and the speech about Pushkin was read on June 8, i.e. even before the printing of the novel was completed, and seven months before his death! He seemed to be in a hurry to express what was most cherished, experienced, significant, as if he had a presentiment of his imminent death.

Talking about Pushkin is like a condensed summary of his novels. Speaking about his favorite poet, whom he admired, Dostoevsky often spoke about himself, about what especially worried him, what was dear and close to him, what asked painful questions of his conscience, what he reflected on all his life. He received as many ovations, as many stormy manifestations of delight from a sympathetic audience, as he had never experienced during his long toil as a writer and novelist.

It was not only a matter of What he spoke on this solemn day, and How this was said to them. Even in his journalistic speech, Dostoevsky showed himself to be a great artist. Therefore, talking about Pushkin is very important for understanding the meaning forms in the work of this master - a question, as you and I can already see, is extremely important in a conversation about Dostoevsky. After all, this is not the bulk of his novels, where the methods of organizing artistic thought, artistic ideas remain, and, apparently, will forever remain a mystery. These are short, compressed limits of the narrative (Dostoevsky himself defined its genre as an “essay”. Everything is visible, everything is clearly revealed. Here speaks a brilliant master who knows the secrets of influencing the feelings and minds of his listeners or readers, skillfully using the techniques of an experienced rhetorician.

But to understand this small form and the mechanism of its influence, you need to turn to the big one - to the novel "The Brothers Karamazov". In it we will find a “blank” for the future speech. Moreover, the most remarkable thing is that this is also a speech - the speech of defense attorney Dmitry Karamazov, lawyer Fetyukovich, an experienced and eloquent judicial figure. It clearly falls into two parts, contrasting with each other. Here is how the author of the novel himself writes about it: “He began extremely directly, simply and with conviction... Not the slightest attempt at eloquence, at pathetic notes, at ringing words. This was a man who spoke in an intimate circle of sympathetic people. But in the second half the speech seemed to suddenly change its tone and even its technique, and at once rose to the level of pathetic, and the audience seemed to be waiting for this and all trembled with delight.” Dostoevsky’s speech was structured in exactly the same way, and the reaction of the listeners turned out to be the same, which is quite natural, since this is an outstanding work of art and the most expressive, “anathemic form,” as one of Chekhov’s characters would say, also talking about a lawyer who knew how to play on one’s nerves listeners, “like on a balalaika” (story “Strong sensations”).

The speech about Pushkin, like the speech of the literary hero, consists of 2 parts. The 1st could be defined as the genre of literary-critical review of Pushkin’s creative path. The second part is a stormy climax, an explosion of pathos and animation: thoughts about the Russian people, about the Russian soul, about the future of Russia in the family of European peoples and the peoples of the world.

Having begun his review with the “Russian wanderer,” an image first discovered by Pushkin and long established in Russian literature, Dostoevsky then moves on to the “positive type of beauty,” to Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. He himself was never able to find own creativity"a positively wonderful person." Previously, he saw it in Dickens' Mr. Pickwick ("Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club") and in Cervantes' Don Quixote, tried to imagine it in the image of Prince Myshkin ("The Idiot"), and finally discovered it in Pushkin's heroine, in this ideal of morality, self-sacrifice and self-denial.

The next subsection of the first part is sharp criticism reality: from the sublime ideal embodied in the Russian woman, Dostoevsky goes into the catacombs of a terrible life, with its inescapable grief and suffering. This time he questions the idea of ​​​​the divine harmony of the world, what we have already defined as his thought about the moral and social disorder of reality, hostile to man. What kind of divine destiny can there be if life is arranged in such a way that it looks like a joke of the devil who decided to laugh at people, and a person’s location in it is like a chamber of the most sophisticated tortures?

Tolstoy very accurately noted that Dostoevsky died at a moment of intense internal struggle. It was reflected most forcefully in the climax of his last novel, coinciding with the culmination of his philosophical and artistic quests - in the chapter “Revolt” of the fifth book of The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan tells Alyosha two stories about children: about a five-year-old girl with her “tears addressed to God” (she is tortured by her parents, a respectable official family), and about a boy hunted by dogs in front of his mother because he hurt his leg while playing the general's favorite hound. Ivan denies the idea of ​​forgiveness: “I don’t want my mother to hug the tormentor who tore her son apart with dogs!” At the first moment Alyosha calls this a “rebellion,” a rebellion against God. Then Ivan poses a question to him, moving from reality into the realm of fantasy and assumptions. He talks about the construction of “the building of human destiny with the goal of ultimately making people happy, giving them, finally, peace and tranquility, but for this it would be necessary and inevitable to torture just one tiny creature, that very child who was beating himself in the chest with his fist , and on his unavenged tears to found this building.” Will Alyosha agree to be an architect on these conditions, and can people “accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a little tortured man, and having accepted, remain happy forever?” It is this dramatic fragment of the novel’s text that will be repeated word for word (with minor variable deviations) in a speech about Pushkin! Dostoevsky did not forget his findings, and at the moment of talking about the sacrifice of Pushkin’s heroine, that she cannot bring pain and grief to another person, he used a powerful climactic surge that he had once created.

The final part of the speech, on an even higher wave of emotional tension, formulates the idea of ​​​​the “all-humanity” (or “universality”) of the Russian people, the Russian character, that the Russian soul will have to utter “the word of great, general harmony, fraternal final agreement of all tribes according to Christ gospel law." Having before his eyes the poor, unhappy Russian land, he did not speak about economic glory, but about “the brotherhood of people and the fact that the Russian heart ... of all peoples is most destined for universal, all-human-brotherly unity.”

The speech about Pushkin, therefore, represents a holistic artistic statement, carefully thought out and expressively executed precisely as a work of art. The novelist makes himself known in a journalistic essay: he is as much a master here as in his fictional works.

So, speaking about Dostoevsky’s system of ideas, we involuntarily - and for a long time now - began to talk about his poetics, about the hidden laws by which the artistic fabric of his works lives: the characters he creates, plot structures, compositional structure. And this is natural: after all, he thinks with “ideas-feelings”, which can only be expressed in artistic form, like Pushkin, who admitted that he often catches himself even thinking in poetry.

One of the most important contributions to the study of the problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics is the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov “Dostoevsky and the Tragedy Novel,” published in 1916. Its provisions were as follows: 1) the object of the image (a common phenomenon of prose) becomes the subject; 2) Dostoevsky demonstrates the isolation of the hero’s consciousness, this is his own world closed in itself; 3) Dostoevsky’s novels are characterized by catharsis, the most important feature of tragedy; 4) the novel form created by Dostoevsky serves to destroy the novel as a specific literary genre.

Of these four theses, only the last one raises doubts: Dostoevsky the novelist, of course, does not destroy the novel, but creates my novel form.

The first two theses - the third is not new, it was once expressed by Belinsky - turned out to be the most popular. They were the basis for M. Bakhtin’s book “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,” which went through several editions (the book was first published in 1927 with a foreword by the then People’s Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky).

The author of the book defines Dostoevsky's novel as "polyphonic" novel, borrowing the term (polyphony is polyphony) from musicology. He notes in F. Dostoevsky “the multiplicity of independent and unmerged voices of consciousness... It is not the multiplicity of characters and destinies in a single objective world in the light of a single author’s consciousness that unfolds in his works, but it is precisely the multiplicity of equal consciousnesses with their worlds that is combined here, maintaining its unmergedness, in the unity of some event."

Another thesis of M. Bakhtin is the statement dialogicity Dostoevsky's system, when one meaning reveals its depths by meeting and coming into contact with another, alien meaning: a dialogue begins between them that overcomes their isolation and one-sidedness.

Dostoevsky also makes extensive use of the effect duality. This technique was not discovered by him; it was developed by the German romantics (remember Hoffmann's "Elixir of Satan"). The essence of duality is not in a split personality (Faustian: “Ah, two souls live in one sick breast of mine!”), but in the reflection of one in the Other. There is an increase, a build-up of meaning: Raskolnikov - Svidrigailov ("Crime and Punishment"); Verkhovensky - Stavrogin ("Demons"); Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan, Dmitry Karamazov, Smerdyakov (“The Brothers Karamazov”), etc. Recently, it has been argued that duality is associated not only with the so-called negative characters, but also with positive ones: Gorshkov - Makar Devushkin in “Poor People”.

In M. Bakhtin's concept, however, there are many unproven and simply unprovable provisions, outright conventions. What are “voices of consciousness”, and even those opposed to characters? or “ideological novel”: after all, the artist, according to Dostoevsky, thinks in “ideas-feelings” and not in ideologemes? or by what miracle does the author disappear in Dostoevsky’s works, and with him “the light of a single author’s consciousness,” if this is not a mystification of the writer’s creative process? What Dostoevsky attached such importance to: originality artistic system, which is capable of causing a response from the perceiver, remains in the shadows here. Meanwhile, a number of works by domestic and foreign researchers examine the architectonics of Dostoevsky’s works, the features of his plot constructions, attention is drawn to repetitions, peculiar “rhymes” of situations, to the centripetal movement of the plot, when, with an abundance of events, there is a constant focus on certain spiritual entities, a pulsating rhythm of the narrative is noted, going from one climax to another in waves of emotional energy, structural integrity individual fragments text, etc. It can be suggested that it is precisely on these paths that new discoveries will arise after Dostoevsky studies are overcome by the “voices of consciousness.”

Philosophical views of F. M. Dostoevsky

Life and work of Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on October 30, 1821 into the family of a military doctor who had settled in Moscow only six months earlier. In 1831, Dostoevsky’s father, although not rich, acquired two villages in the Tula province, and established very strict rules on his estate. Ultimately, this led to tragedy: in 1839, the peasants, outraged by the tyranny of their owner, killed him. This event caused severe psychological trauma to the future writer; as his daughter claimed, the first attack of epilepsy, which haunted Dostoevsky for the rest of his life, happened precisely after he received the news of his father’s death. Two years earlier, at the beginning of 1837, Dostoevsky's mother died. The closest person to him was his older brother Mikhail.

In 1838, Mikhail and Fyodor Dostoevsky moved to St. Petersburg and entered the Military Engineering School, located in the Mikhailovsky Castle. During these years, the main event in Dostoevsky's life was his acquaintance with Ivan Shidlovsky, an aspiring writer, under whose influence Dostoevsky became interested in the literature of romanticism (especially Schiller). In 1843, he graduated from college and received a modest position in the engineering department. New responsibilities weighed heavily on Dostoevsky, and already in 1844, at his own request, he was dismissed from service. From that moment on, he devoted himself entirely to his writing vocation.

In 1845, his first work, “Poor People,” was published, which delighted Belinsky and made Dostoevsky famous. However, his subsequent works caused confusion and misunderstanding. At the same time, Dostoevsky became close to Petrashevsky’s circle, whose members were passionate about socialist ideas and discussed the possibility of realizing a socialist utopia (in the spirit of the teachings of Charles Fourier) in Russia. Later, in the novel “Demons,” Dostoevsky gave a grotesque image of some of the Petrashevites, presenting them as members of Verkhovensky’s revolutionary “five.” In 1849, members of the circle were arrested and sentenced to death. The execution was supposed to take place on December 22, 1849. However, already taken to the scaffold for execution, the convicts heard a decree of pardon. The experience of near death on the scaffold, and then four years of hardship and hardship at hard labor radically influenced the writer’s views, giving his worldview that “existential” dimension, which largely determined all of his subsequent work.

After hard labor and exile, Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859. In 1861, together with his brother Mikhail, he began publishing the magazine “Time”, the program goal of which was to create a new ideology of “soilism”, overcoming the opposition of Slavophilism and Westernism. In 1863, the magazine was closed for its adherence to liberal ideas; In 1864, the publication of the magazine “Epoch” began, but it soon ceased to exist for financial reasons. It was during this period that Dostoevsky became actively involved in journalism for the first time; he would return to it in the last years of his life, releasing “The Diary of a Writer.” The year 1864 became especially difficult for Dostoevsky: in addition to the closure of his journal, he experienced the death of his beloved brother Mikhail and his first wife M. Isaeva (their marriage was concluded in 1857). In 1866, while working on the novel The Gambler, Dostoevsky met a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, who became his second wife the following year.

While still in exile, Dostoevsky published “Notes from the House of the Dead” (1855), which reflected a sharp change in his views on life. From an ideal-romantic idea of ​​the natural goodness of man and hope in the achievability of moral perfection, Dostoevsky moves to a sober and deep description the most tragic problems human existence. One by one they come out great novels: “Crime and Punishment” (1866), “The Idiot” (1867), “Demons” (1871-1872), “The Teenager” (1875), “The Brothers Karamazov” (1879-1880).

Dostoevsky's speech, delivered at the celebrations at the consecration of the Pushkin monument in Moscow (in May 1880), caused a great resonance in the public opinion of Russia. Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech,” in which he expressed the conviction that the Russian people are called upon to realize the idea of ​​an “all-human” unification of peoples and cultures, became a kind of testament of the writer, which, in particular, had a huge influence on his young friend Vladimir Solovyov. On January 28, 1881, Dostoevsky died suddenly.

The problem of faith in the works of Dostoevsky

The literature devoted to the analysis of Dostoevsky's philosophical worldview is very extensive, but in the entire body of work one main tendency clearly dominates, representing Dostoevsky as religious writer, who sought to show the dead ends of irreligious consciousness and prove the impossibility for a person to live without faith in God; N.O. Lossky made especially a lot of effort to substantiate it. The corresponding interpretation is so widespread and has such a universal character that almost all Dostoevsky researchers have paid tribute to it to one degree or another.

However, the prevalence of this point of view on Dostoevsky’s work does not make it conclusive; on the contrary, the fact that in Dostoevsky’s thoughts about man and God not only thinkers close to the canonical Orthodox tradition, but also very far from it (for example, A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre and other representatives of the so-called “atheistic existentialism”), speaks against such a simple solution to Dostoevsky’s problem.

In order to understand whether Dostoevsky was a religious (Orthodox) writer in full and in the exact sense This definition, let us think about what meaning we put into the concept of “religious artist”. It seems obvious that the main thing here is the unambiguous acceptance of the religious (Orthodox) worldview, taken in its historical, ecclesiastical form. In this case, religious art has the sole purpose of demonstrating the positive meaning of religious faith in a person's life; even a departure from faith should be depicted by an artist only in order to more clearly demonstrate the benefits of a life based on faith.

Some of Dostoevsky's heroes, indeed, act as consistent exponents of a holistic Orthodox worldview. Among them we can highlight Elder Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov and Makar Dolgorukov from The Teenager. However, they can hardly be called Dostoevsky’s main characters, and it is not in their stories and statements (rather banal) that the true meaning of the writer’s worldview is revealed. Dostoevsky’s artistic talent and depth of thought manifest themselves with particular force not in those cases when he gives an image of the worldview of a “real Christian” (as Lossky believed), but when he tries to understand a person who is just seeking faith; or a person who has found a faith that is radically divergent from what is accepted as “normal” in society; or even a person who renounces all faith altogether. The depth of Dostoevsky’s artistic thinking lies in the clear demonstration that all these worldviews can be extremely integral and consistent, and the people who profess them can be no less purposeful, complex in their inner world and significant in this life than “real Christians.”

We can agree that many central characters Dostoevsky - Raskolnikov, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, Versilov, Stavrogin, Ivan and Dmitry Karamazov - with their novel fate partially confirm the thesis about the absolute value of faith. However, in all these cases, Dostoevsky’s main goal is not to condemn their unbelief and not to proclaim faith as a panacea for all troubles and suffering. He tries to reveal the depth of the inconsistency of the human soul. Depicting the fallen soul, Dostoevsky wants to understand the logic of its “fall,” to reveal the internal “anatomy” of sin, to determine all the grounds and the whole tragedy of unbelief, sin, and crime. It is no coincidence that in Dostoevsky’s novels the tragedy of unbelief and sin is never resolved with a blissful and unambiguous ending. It is impossible to assert that Dostoevsky depicts fallen souls only in order to show the inevitability of their movement towards faith - towards the traditional Christian faith in God. “Sinners” and “apostates” in his novels almost never turn into believers and “blessed”; as a rule, they are ready to persist in their deviation from the purity of faith to the end. Perhaps only once - in the case of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky gives an example of sincere repentance and unconditional conversion to the Orthodox faith and church. However, this is exactly the case when an exception to the rule only confirms the rule. The epilogue of the novel, depicting the life of Raskolnikov, who repented and turned to faith, looks like a concession to a previously accepted scheme, external to the artistic logic of the novel. It is quite obvious that new life Raskolnikova, which is mentioned in the epilogue, could never become an essential theme of Dostoevsky's work - it was not his theme. In addition, it is appropriate to recall that in the text of the novel itself, Raskolnikov’s repentance and all his moral torments are connected with the fact that, having committed murder, he broke some invisible network of relationships with other people. The awareness of the impossibility of existing outside this life-giving network of relationships leads him to repentance, and it must be emphasized that repentance is carried out precisely before people, and not before God.

Stories of the other two famous heroes Dostoevsky - Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov, who are often mentioned in support of the thesis about Dostoevsky as an Orthodox artist and thinker, also cannot be considered as obvious evidence in favor of this thesis. These heroes, unlike Raskolnikov, are not given “rebirth”; they die: one physically, the other morally. But the paradox is that neither one nor the other can be called unbelievers; the tragedy of their lives has much deeper reasons than just a lack of faith. Here the problem is raised about the eternal and irremovable dialectic of faith and unbelief in the human soul. Suffice it to recall that the famous “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” which raises the question of the essence of true faith, is the work of Ivan Karamazov, and Stavrogin is repeatedly mentioned on the pages of the novel “Demons” as a person who provided examples of genuine, sincere faith for the people around him (as evidenced by Shatov and Kirillov) - however, just like examples of radical unbelief. And it is not by chance that many researchers of Dostoevsky’s work considered the images of Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov the most important for an adequate understanding of the writer’s views.

Even where Dostoevsky speaks directly about the need to find faith, the sought-after faith itself turns out to be very far from its traditional dogmatic and ecclesiastical form. Like other Russian thinkers of the 19th century. (remember P. Chaadaev, V. Odoevsky, A. Herzen), Dostoevsky felt deep dissatisfaction with the worldview that was associated with Russian church Orthodoxy of the 17th-19th centuries. Without explicitly renouncing it, he tried to find in it the content that was lost in previous centuries. And in these searches, perhaps without even noticing it, Dostoevsky, in essence, went beyond the boundaries of tradition and formulated principles and ideas that were to become the basis of a completely new worldview in the future, one that did not fit into the Orthodox framework. In this regard, most often the tragedy of unbelief in Dostoevsky is organically complemented by the paradoxical tragedy of faith; it is sincere faith, which does not recognize compromises, or its search that becomes the source of suffering and even death of the hero, as happens, for example, with Kirillov from the novel “Demons” (more details this will be discussed below).

Those problems and doubts that torment Dostoevsky’s heroes were, of course, painfully experienced by their author himself. Obviously, the question of the nature of Dostoevsky's religiosity is much more complex and ambiguous than some studies suggest. IN notebook Dostoevsky we find the famous words: “And in Europe there is no such power of atheistic expressions and there never was. Therefore, it is not like a boy that I believe in Christ and confess Him. My Hosanna went through a great crucible of doubts.” Dostoevsky admitted more than once that there was a period in his life when he was in deep disbelief. It would seem that the meaning of the above statement is that faith was finally acquired by him and remained unshakable, especially since the quoted entry was made by Dostoevsky in 1881 - in the last year of his life. But we can’t help but remember something else. Many researchers argue convincingly that of the heroes of “The Brothers Karamazov” - Dostoevsky’s last novel - Ivan Karamazov is closest to the author in his worldview, the same Ivan who demonstrates the depth of the dialectic of faith and unbelief. It can be assumed that in the life of Dostoevsky, as in the life of his main characters, faith and unbelief were not separate stages life path, but two inseparable and complementary moments, and the faith that Dostoevsky passionately sought can hardly be equated with traditional Orthodoxy. For Dostoevsky, faith does not at all bring a person into a state of mental peace; on the contrary, it brings with it an anxious search for the true meaning of life. Finding faith not only solves the most important problems in life, but helps to put them correctly; this is precisely its significance. Her paradoxical nature is manifested in the fact that she cannot help but question herself as well - which is why complacency is the first sign of loss of faith.

How is it even possible to distinguish between a person who sincerely believes and a person who declares “I believe,” but carries in his soul doubts about his faith or even unbelief? What are the criteria and consequences of true faith, especially in a world that to a greater extent settles down and develops on a non-religious basis? Neither Dostoevsky's heroes nor the author himself were able to give a final answer to these questions (these questions remained central to all Russian philosophy after Dostoevsky). And perhaps this, in particular, is where the depth and attractiveness of the great writer’s work lies.

New understanding of man

The fact that the writer, who did not leave behind a single purely philosophical essay, is a prominent representative of Russian philosophy, who had a significant influence on its development, shows how Russian philosophy differs from its classical Western models. The main thing here is not the rigor and logic of philosophical reasoning, but the direct reflection in philosophical quests of those problems that are associated with the life choice of each person and without solving which our existence will become meaningless. It is precisely these questions that the heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels solve, and the main thing for them is the question of man’s relationship to God - the same question about the essence of faith, only taken in its most fundamental, metaphysical formulation.

Dostoevsky brings to the fore the problem of insoluble antinomy human existence- a problem that, as we have seen, was one of the most important for Russian philosophy and Russian culture. The basis and source of this antinomy is the contradiction between the universality, goodness, timelessness of God and the empirical concreteness, inferiority, and mortality of man. The simplest way to resolve this contradiction is to assume the complete superiority of one side over the other. One may recall that for the sake of preserving absolute personal freedom and independence of man, Herzen was ready to defend almost atheistic views of the world; Slavophiles, on the contrary, proclaiming the deep unity of God and man, were forced to leave aside the problem of the fundamental imperfection of human nature, the problem of the rootedness of evil in it. Dostoevsky sees too well both all the “peaks” of the human spirit and all its “abyss” to be satisfied with such extreme ones and therefore simple solutions. He wants to justify before the face of God not only the universal spiritual essence of man, but also the concrete, unique and limited personality itself, in all the richness of its good and evil manifestations. But since the unity of God and imperfect empirical man cannot be comprehended in terms of classical rationalism, Dostoevsky radically breaks with the rationalist tradition. The most important thing in man cannot be deduced either from the laws of nature or from the universal essence of God. Man is a unique and irrational creature in its essence, combining the most radical contradictions of the universe. Later, already in the philosophy of the 20th century, this statement became main theme Western European and Russian existentialism, and it is not surprising that representatives of this trend rightly considered Dostoevsky their predecessor.

Following Pushkin, Dostoevsky turned out to be an artist who deeply reflected in his work the “dissonant” nature of Russian culture and the Russian worldview. However, there is also a significant difference in the views of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. In Pushkin, a person found himself at the “crossroads” of the main contradictions of existence, as if a toy of struggling forces (for example, the hero of “The Bronze Horseman” dies in a clash of the elemental forces of nature with the eternal ideals and “idols” of civilization, personified by the statue of Peter). For Dostoevsky, man is a unique bearer of all these contradictions, a battlefield between them. In his soul he unites both the lowest and the highest. This is most accurately expressed in the words of Dmitry Karamazov: “... another person, even higher in heart and with a lofty mind, will begin with the ideal of the Madonna, and end with the ideal of Sodom. Even more terrible is someone who, already with the ideal of Sodom in his soul, does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns from it and truly, truly burns, as in his young, blameless years.”

And despite such inconsistency, a person represents an integrity that is almost impossible to decompose into components and recognize as secondary in relation to some more fundamental entity - even in relation to God! This gives rise to the problem of the relationship between God and man; their relationship, in a certain sense, becomes the relationship of equal parties, becomes a genuine “dialogue” that enriches both sides. God gives man the basis of his existence and the highest system of values ​​for his life, but man (specific empirical man) turns out to be an irrational “addition” of divine existence, enriching him at the expense of his freedom, his “willfulness.” It is not for nothing that the central place in many of Dostoevsky’s works is occupied by heroes capable of “rebellion” against God (the hero of the story Notes from Underground, Raskolnikov, Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov). It is the one who is capable of daring unlimited freedom, most closely correspond to Dostoevsky’s paradoxical ideal of man. Only after going through all the temptations of “willfulness” and “rebellion” is a person able to achieve true faith and true hope for achieving harmony in his own soul and in the world around him.

Everything that has been said so far is only a very preliminary and inaccurate expression of that new concept of man that grows out of Dostoevsky’s artistic images. In order to concretize and clarify it, we must first of all pay attention to how Dostoevsky understands the relationships between people in their common social life and how he solves the problem of the dialectical relationship between a unique personality and mystical conciliar unity, a problem that arose in the works of his predecessors . A. Khomyakov’s concept of the mystical Church is especially important for understanding Dostoevsky’s views.

Khomyakov understood the Church as a mystical spiritual-material unity of people, already in this earthly life uniting with each other and with divine reality. At the same time, he believed that the mystical unity of people is of a divinely perfect nature, already overshadowed by divine grace. Dostoevsky, fully accepting the idea of ​​the mystical unity of people, brings the object of mystical feeling closer to our earthly reality to a much greater extent and therefore does not consider this unity to be divine and perfect. But it is precisely this “downgrading” of mystical unity to our earthly life that helps justify the enormous role that it plays in the life of every person, constantly influencing his actions and thoughts. The mystical interaction and mutual influence of people, keenly felt by Dostoevsky, is clearly reflected in the magical atmosphere of universal interdependence that fills his novels. The presence of this magical atmosphere makes us consider many strange features almost natural. art world Dostoevsky: the appearance of all the most important characters at certain climactic moments at the same point in the novel’s space, conversations “in unison”, when one character seems to pick up and develop the words and thoughts of another, strange guessing of thoughts and prediction of actions, etc. All this external signs of that invisible, mystical network of relationships in which Dostoevsky’s heroes are included - even those who set the goal of destroying this network, breaking out of it (Verkhovensky, Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, etc.).

Particularly expressive examples of the manifestation of the mystical relationship between people are provided by characteristic episodes present in each of Dostoevsky’s novels: when they meet, the characters communicate in silence, and Dostoevsky scrupulously calculates the time - one, two, three, five minutes. Obviously, two people who have a common life problem can remain silent for several minutes only if this silence is a unique form of mystical communication.

Returning to the comparative analysis of Khomyakov’s concept of conciliarity and Dostoevsky’s idea of ​​the mystical unity of people, it is necessary to emphasize once again that the main drawback of Khomyakov’s concept is its excessive optimism in assessing the existence of a person living in the sphere of the “true” (Orthodox) church. For Khomyakov, the mystical Church is divine existence, and it turns out that a person is already involved in the ideal in earthly life. Dostoevsky rejects such a simple solution to all earthly problems; for him, the irrational-mystical unity of people, realized in earthly life, differs from the unity that should be realized in God. Moreover, the final unity turns out to be simply some ultimate goal, some ideal, the possibility of embodiment of which (even in posthumous existence!) is questioned or even denied. Dostoevsky does not really believe in the final (and even more so simple) achievability of the ideal state of man, humanity, the entire world existence; this ideal state frightens him with its “immobility”, even some kind of “deadness” (especially expressive confirmation of this idea is given by the story “Notes from the Underground” and the story “Dream” funny man", see section 4.7 for details). It is the earthly, imperfect, full of contradictions and conflicts, unity of people that he recognizes as essential and saving for man; outside of this unity none of us can exist.

An equally radical divergence between Dostoevsky and Khomyakov concerns the assessment of individual freedom and individual identity. Dostoevsky admitted that A. Herzen had a huge influence on him; he deeply accepted Herzen’s idea of ​​​​the absolute unconditionality of the individual and his freedom. But, paradoxically, he combined this idea with Khomyakov’s principle of the mystical unity of people, eliminating the polar opposite of the two approaches to understanding man. Like Herzen, Dostoevsky affirms the absoluteness of personality; however, he insists that the value and independence of each of us is based on mystical relationships with other people. As soon as a person breaks these connections, he loses himself, loses the basis for his individual existence. This happens, for example, with Raskolnikov and Stavrogin. On the other hand, like Khomyakov, Dostoevsky recognizes the universal mystical unity of people as really existing, recognizes the existence of a certain “force field” of relationships in which every person is included. However, this “force field” itself cannot exist otherwise than by being embodied in an individual personality, which becomes, as it were, the center of a field of interactions. Khomyakov’s mystical Church still rises above individual people and can be understood as the universal, dissolving the individual. For Dostoevsky, nothing universal exists (this idea is clearly expressed in M. Bakhtin’s studies of Dostoevsky), therefore even the unity that embraces people appears to him as personified by one person or another. This unity, as it were, concentrates and becomes visible in an individual person, who is thereby assigned the full measure of responsibility for the destinies of other people. If a person is unable to bear this responsibility (and this almost always happens), his fate turns out to be tragic and this tragedy captures everyone around him. All Dostoevsky's novels contain an image of this tragedy, in which a person, voluntarily or by the will of fate, has accepted responsibility for those around him, goes to physical or moral death (Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Versilov, Prince Myshkin, Ivan Karamazov). This tragedy of communication once again proves how far the earthly unity of people is from the goodness and perfection of divine existence. As a result, the idea of ​​the mystical earthly interconnection of people leads Dostoevsky not to confidence in the victory of good and justice (as was the case with Khomyakov), but to the concept of the fundamental, irremovable guilt of everyone before all people and for everything that happens in the world.

Personality as the Absolute

Dostoevsky clearly formulated the main goal of his work in a letter to his brother Mikhail dated August 16, 1839: “Man is a mystery. It needs to be solved, and if you spend your whole life solving it, don’t say you wasted your time; I am engaged in this mystery because I want to be a man.” However, this general statement in itself does not provide an understanding creative method and Dostoevsky’s worldview, since the problem of man was central to all world literature. It should be added that for Dostoevsky a person is interesting not in his empirical-psychological section, but in that metaphysical dimension where his connection with all being and his central position in the world are revealed.

For understanding the human metaphysics underlying Dostoevsky’s novels, Vyach’s ideas are of great importance. Ivanov, expressed in his article “Dostoevsky and the Tragedy Novel”. According to Vyach. Ivanov, Dostoevsky created new uniform the novel is a tragedy novel, and in this form there was a return of art to that insight into the foundations of life, which was characteristic of ancient Greek mythology and ancient Greek tragedy and which was lost in subsequent eras. Contrasting Dostoevsky's work with classical European literature, Ivanov argues that there is a radical difference in the metaphysical concepts of man, which underlie, respectively, the classical European novel of the modern era and the basis of Dostoevsky's tragedy novel.

A classic novel from Cervantes to L. Tolstoy, as Vyach believes. Ivanov, was entirely focused on an increasingly deeper image of the subjective world of the individual, opposing the objective world as a special spiritual reality. This methodology appeared in its clearest form in the psychological novel of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Assuming that each individuality (the inner world of each “human atom”) is subject to the same basic laws, the author of a psychological novel limits himself to studying only his own inner world, considering the rest of reality - both the objective environment outside a person and other people - only in its refraction and reflection in the “mirror” of one’s inner world.

Analyzing the work of Dostoevsky, Vyach. Ivanov finds in its basis completely different metaphysical principles in comparison with the “metaphysics” of the classical novel. In the latter, the main thing is the idealistic confrontation between the subject and objective reality, leading to the closure of the individual in his own subjectivity. Dostoevsky, on the contrary, removes the distinction between subject and object and contrasts knowledge based on such a distinction with a special way of relating the individual to the surrounding reality. “It is not knowledge that is the basis of the realism defended by Dostoevsky, but “penetration”: it was not for nothing that Dostoevsky loved this word and derived from it another, new one - “penetrated.” Penetration is a certain transcensus of the subject, such a state in which it becomes possible to perceive someone else’s self not as an object, but as another subject... The symbol of such penetration lies in the absolute affirmation, with all the will and all the mind, of someone else’s being: “you are.” Subject to this completeness of affirmation of someone else's being, a completeness that seems to exhaust the entire content of my own being, someone else's being ceases to be alien to me, “you” becomes for me another designation of my subject. “You are” does not mean “you are known by me as existing,” but “your existence is experienced by me as mine,” or: “by your being I recognize myself as existing.” Dostoevsky, Vyach believes. Ivanov, in his metaphysical realism, does not dwell on the atomistic opposition of individual “unfused” personalities (as M. Bakhtin asserts in his famous concept), but, on the contrary, is confident in the possibility of radically overcoming this opposition in mystical “penetration”, “transcensus”e ". "This "penetration", mystically uniting people, does not detract from their personal beginning, but helps to affirm it. In the act of "penetration", "merging" with another, a person realizes his universality, realizes that it is he who is the true (and only!) the center of the universe, that there is no external necessity to which it would be forced to submit.In this act, the “I” is transformed from a subject (only a subject) into a universal principle, into a universal existential basis that determines everything and everyone in the world.

Of course, the formulated ideas are not expressed directly in the texts of Dostoevsky’s novels, however, the point of view of Vyach. Ivanova receives a strong justification when considering the entire complex of philosophical principles expressed by Dostoevsky in his works of art, in journalism, and in diary entries. Obvious proof of the validity of this conclusion is the influence exerted by Dostoevsky’s work on many outstanding thinkers of the 20th century, who viewed man not as a separate “atom” in an alien reality, but as the center and basis of everything that exists. Dostoevsky turned out to be the founder of that direction of philosophical thought, at the end of which stand the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, who proclaimed the demand for a “return to being” and “overcoming subjectivity”, which resulted in the creation of an ontology of a completely new type, which posits the analysis of human existence as the basis for a metaphysical analysis of reality (the most developed version of such an ontology - “fundamental ontology” - was given by M. Heidegger).

Dostoevsky does not recognize the dominance of the world, nature, inanimate being over man; The human personality is a kind of dynamic center of existence, the source of all the most destructive and most beneficial, unifying forces operating in existence. Berdyaev expressed this main idea of ​​Dostoevsky’s metaphysics aphoristically: “the human heart is embedded in the bottomless depth of being,” “the principle of human individuality remains to the very bottom of being.”

Within the framework of the new metaphysics, the contours of which Dostoevsky outlines, it is no longer possible to consider the individuality, integrity and freedom of a person as “parameters” of his isolation and self-isolation. These characteristics reflect not so much the meaning of the limited life of an individual, but rather the meaning of the endless fullness of life as such, which does not recognize the difference between internal and external, material and ideal. Man is the creative center of reality, destroying all the boundaries set by the world, overcoming all the laws external to him. Dostoevsky is not interested in psychological nuances mental life of a person, justifying his behavior, but those “dynamic” components of personal existence, which express the volitional energy of the individual, his original creativity in being. At the same time, even a crime can become a creative act (as happens with Raskolnikov and Rogozhin), but this only proves what an internally contradictory nature the freedom and creative energy of the individual (the personal beginning of being itself) has, how differently it can be realized on the “surface” » being.

Although Dostoevsky's heroes, in essence, are no different from ordinary, empirical people, we clearly feel that, along with the usual empirical dimension, they also have an additional dimension of being, which is the main one. In this - metaphysical - dimension, the mystical unity of people, which was mentioned above, is ensured; it also reveals the absolute fundamentality of each personality, its central position in being. Considering that the metaphysical unity of people always appears extremely concretely, we can say that in addition to real empirical heroes in Dostoevsky’s novels there is always another important character - a single metaphysical Personality, a single metaphysical Hero. The relationship of this single metaphysical Personality with empirical personalities, empirical heroes of novels has nothing in common with the relationship of an abstract and universal essence with its phenomena (in the spirit of philosophical idealism). It is not a special substance that rises above individuals and erases their individuality, but a strong and immanent basis for their identity. Just as the consubstantial God has three hypostases, three faces, possessing an infinite - unique and inexpressible - individuality, so the Personality, as the metaphysical center of being, is realized in the multitude of its “hypostases”, persons - empirical personalities.

Individual characters in Dostoevsky's novels can be considered as relatively independent “voices” speaking from the existential unity of the Personality (the mystical, conciliar unity of all people) and expressing its internal dialectical opposites. In all of Dostoevsky’s novels one can find pairs of characters who are in strange relationships of attraction and repulsion; these pairs personify (in “hypostatic” form) the indicated opposites and contradictions of the personal principle of being. Sometimes such couples are stable throughout the entire novel, sometimes they reveal their opposition in individual episodes and passages. Examples of such pairs are given by Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin in “The Idiot”, Raskolnikov and Sonya Marmeladova in “Crime and Punishment”, Stavrogin and Shatov, as well as Stavrogin and Verkhovensky in “Demons”, etc. This opposition is especially clear, as a split in essence a single Personality, is revealed in “The Brothers Karamazov” in oppositions: Ivan Karamazov-Smerdyakov and Ivan-Alyosha. All the sharpest, irreconcilable contradictions between Dostoevsky’s characters are a manifestation of the internal contradictions of the Personality as such and, therefore (due to the inextricable unity-identity of each empirical personality and metaphysical Personality) - the internal contradictions of any empirical personality. But also about

Dostoevsky's philosophical views, clearly expressed in his artistic works, voiced the pre- and post-war search for the meaning of the life of a human being. Problems of meaning in life become the center of philosophical reflection, the problem of freedom and responsibility, the problem of rebellion and humility, happiness and peace. The Socratic slogan “Know thyself” becomes the starting point of the quest of Dostoevsky and his followers. The object of his research is a person who is taken not in a schematic, formal image, but in the fullness of his emotional being. The world that is not so much knowable as experienced becomes an object of comprehension for them. What is a person without his feelings and emotions? Nothing. What makes a person feel, seek, suffer, love and hate? These are the questions Dostoevsky poses in his works.

He is interested, first of all, in the question of the mystery of the existence of human interests, the motives of actions. How, where, why is this or that action born? Why is Prince Myshkin in “The Idiot” so organic in his authenticity, why is Nastasya Filippovna “doomed” to the death that love generates? Why is Myshkin himself called an “idiot”? Why does Rodion Raskolnikov decide to kill? Is this how his rebellion is expressed? And many many others. For Dostoevsky, existence itself is, first of all, the existence of the human soul. The true reality of the “I”, the human personality, is manifested and cognized in its existence in the world; a person is free and alone in the world. How to get out of this loneliness? Freedom - a gift or a punishment? These and many other questions arise when you read Dostoevsky. personality Dostoevsky philosophical revolt

Let us dwell in more detail on two problems that sound in Dostoevsky’s works and are central - these are the problems of rebellion and freedom.

Dostoevsky's rebellious philosophy can be seen most clearly in the characters of Rodion Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. Raskolnikov is not a terrible “monster” who killed an old money-lender and her sister in cold blood, but a living, vulnerable, deeply suffering and feeling person.

What is his crime? He killed a man, he did it deliberately, after careful preparation. Indeed, at all times murder was considered a terrible crime. One of the first commandments of the Biblical Moses, recognized by both Jews and Christians, says: “Thou shalt not kill!” If, according to the Bible, the first murderer on Earth, Cain, was punished with eternal exile (hence the word “repent”, i.e. suffer from crime committed), then subsequently death was imposed for the death inflicted on another: “Whoever strikes a person so that he dies shall be put to death... and if someone with the intention of killing his neighbor treacherously (and runs to the altar), then take from my altar him to death."

Or, what has become a proverb - “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” All this suggests that every crime is followed by punishment. The entire Christian doctrine is built on the idea of ​​retribution, nothing goes unpunished, whether punishment comes immediately or gradually, from other people or from God, who lives in us through our conscience.

Raskolnikov is a criminal, but what was the reason, or as lawyers say, the motive for his crime. Firstly, of course, poverty, which drove him to despair, gave rise to debts, life from hand to mouth, etc. In a word, an inhuman existence. But this is not the main thing. A fatal role in Rodion Raskolnikov’s decision to kill the old money lender was played by an overheard conversation between a student he did not know and an officer. “Kill her and take her money, so that with their help you can then devote yourself to serving all of humanity and the common cause: what do you think, won’t this tiny crime be atoned for by thousands of good deeds? In one life - thousands of lives saved from rotting and decomposition". Raskolnikov convinces himself that by freeing the world from this worthless, evil and greedy old woman, he is doing a good deed. But it is no coincidence that they say: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” For it is so difficult for a person to understand what is evil and what is good. How many murders have been committed at all times in the name of a high goal - this is the communist red terror in Russia, which resulted in the genocide of its own people, and the Muslim “gazavat” (holy war), and Crusades medieval knights. By committing this crime, Raskolnik strives to free others and free himself.

However, besides this, he is trying to determine himself and his place in the world - “Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right?” - he asks. He strives to become a superman, free not only from debts, but also from generally accepted moral standards, from the need to obey the law. He checks himself. He rebels against injustice and his own smallness. Killing in order to defeat oneself, killing for the sake of killing is a terrible ideology, but, unfortunately, it really exists today. How many of these “Raskolnikovs” are fighting today in Chechnya and other “hot spots”. Despite all the seeming shockingness of Raskolnikov’s image and action, he is not invented, he is “open”, like in a museum for inspection. Only museum exhibits cannot harm anyone, unlike preachers of “permissiveness.” The ideas of Rodion Raskolnikov were presented in the article, which actually brought Porfiry Petrovich to him. He is trying to put himself on a par with Napoleon - a “real ruler,” a man to whom “everything is permitted.” Having divided people into lower and higher, he seeks himself among the higher.

However, after committing a crime, he does not stop tormenting, does not stop searching and desperately understands that he is not one of those who don’t care about anything, to whom “everything is allowed,” and do such people even exist? “... I wanted to cross as quickly as possible,” says Raskolnikov, “... I didn’t kill a person, I killed a principle! I killed a principle, but I didn’t cross, I stayed on this side.”

Fear of exposure, pangs of conscience, a strange feeling of being trapped, the realization that all his ideas are deception becomes the first and main punishment of Rodion Raskolnikov. Slowly and methodically, Porfiry Petrovich brings him to the need for recognition. But only a meeting with Sonechka Marmeladova, her love, her Christian position helps him understand what he has done. “He looked at Sonya and felt how much of her love was on him, and strangely, he suddenly felt heavy and painful because he was loved so much.” It is Sonya, with her faith, her love, who defeats the evil that lives in Raskolnikov. Having learned about his crime, she firmly decides: “We will suffer together, together we will bear the cross.” Sonya convinces Rodion to repent and accept the inevitable punishment. She helps him understand the main meaning of Christian doctrine, which affirms the need for humility, the value of any life and the impossibility of doing good with the help of evil. Having realized and accepted this for himself, Rodion Raskolnikov accepts hard labor as a benefit for himself, because... I deeply understood and felt that there is no more strict judge of a person than his conscience, and there is no greater punishment than the torment of conscience.

F.M. Dostoevsky, talking about Raskolnikov, tries to understand and unravel one of the greatest mysteries - why does a person commit a crime and what is the punishment? Having traced the history of Raskolnikov's mental anguish, he leads his hero to the same convictions that he himself came to: from rebellion to humility, from the proud exaltation of man to the veneration of God and the truths of the Christian faith. Therefore, thousands of Cains (Raskolnikovs) live and walk the Earth. And both the image of the biblical Cain and the image of Rodion Raskolnikov will always remind people of the inevitability of punishment. More deeper topic rebellion is revealed in The Brothers Karamazov, especially in the famous legend about the great inquisitor, after listening to which Alyosha looks at his brother Ivan with horror and says his famous: “So this is a rebellion.” Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov appear in Dostoevsky as if divorced different sides in the image of Raskolnikov - one rebels, the other humbles himself. Both rebellion and humility, according to Dostoevsky, are like brothers, they love and do not accept each other, but do not exist without each other. Maybe the images of Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov tell us this.

In Camus, the rebellious man becomes the central image of literary philosophical creativity. Being an active admirer of Dostoevsky, it is from him that he seeks justification for his ideas. His favorite image remains Ivan Karamazov, whom he, by the way, played in student theater. Perhaps his philosophical portrait of a “rebellious man” was copied from him. Human feelings are not subjective, Camus believes, they exist as an ontological reality and often act outside the will and desire of a person as regulators of his behavior and search. If we trace this thesis through the image of Mitya Karamazov, then we will find confirmation of this in his frantic, “unreasonable” love for Grushenka. This love lives on its own, contrary to all logic and meaning, and it is not he who controls love, but she who controls him. When you get acquainted with the personality of Mitya Karamazov throughout the novel, you are struck by his tornness, unbridledness, some kind of tragic fullness of all his experiences and thoughts and actions. Deprived of love in childhood, he does not know how to manage his own love; it acquires the features of a violent fanatical, one might even say, unhealthy attachment (which is comparable to Rogozhin’s love for Nastasya Filippovna in “The Idiot”) for Grushenka. His love does not fit into the traditional framework everyday ideas about what is and what should be. Refusing the love of the “decent”, beautiful, intelligent and rich Katerina Ivanovna, he achieves the love of a “fallen” woman - Grushenka, whom he disputes with his father. It is interesting, however, that the first, in the end, betrays him, and the second is ready to accept any fate next to him. Note that for Dostoevsky this becomes a completely traditional way of establishing moral purity in the person of a woman according to the ideas of everyday morality, a sanctimonious worldview, unworthy and fallen: this is Sonechka Marmeladova in “Crime and Punishment”, and Nastasya Filippovna in “The Idiot” - their authenticity, their Dostoevsky contrasts sincerity, depth of feelings (for they were touched by suffering) with the pretense and frivolity of “good” young ladies.

The idea of ​​suffering - its elevating and purifying power, is one of Dostoevsky's main ideas. He puts all his heroes through suffering in search of the meaning and meaning of true existence. Camus, trying to answer the same question, comes to the conclusion that the world itself is not absurd, as it appears to the reflective mind, it is simply unreasonable, because is a non-human reality that has nothing to do with our desires and our minds. This does not mean that the world is unknowable, irrational, like Schopenhauer’s “will” or Bergson’s “vital impulse”. The world is transparent to our minds, but does not provide answers to the main questions, which gives rise to “rebellion.” Rebel of Man is the story of the idea of ​​rebellion, which originates from Dostoevsky - metaphysical and political, against the injustice of the human lot. The influence of Dostoevsky can also be traced in Camus’s ideological justification for the rebellion. His work "The Rebel Man" begins with the question of justification for murder. People have always killed each other - this is the truth of the fact. Anyone who kills in a fit of passion is brought to trial and sometimes sent to the guillotine. But today the real threat is not these lone criminals, but government officials who coldly send millions of people to their deaths, justifying mass murder in the interests of the nation, state security, the progress of mankind, and the logic of history.

Man of the twentieth century found himself faced with totalitarian ideologies that served as justification for murder. On the tablets of the twentieth century it is written: “Kill.” Dostoevsky analyzes the genealogy of this slogan. The problem is that “everything is permitted,” i.e. the question posed by Rodion Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.”

Another admirer of Dostoevsky who developed some of his ideas, including those that have already been analyzed by us, was N.A. Berdyaev. Nikolai Berdyaev is usually classified as an existentialist, because the pathos of his philosophical work is entirely imbued with the famous call of Socrates - “Know thyself.” Berdyaev's philosophy is, to the highest degree, the philosophy of a person searching for himself, cognizing this world in order to find his dignity in it. Berdyaev hates any type of slavery, be it political or religious slavery. Enough about the political. As for the religious, being deeply religious, a consciously religious person, Nikolai Berdyaev did not recognize the spiritual dictate, which, in his opinion, the official Orthodox Church has always “sinned”. Analyzing famous Legend about the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", he draws attention to Dostoevsky's thought about the reasons why Jesus came into the world poor and persecuted. And he tries to answer the question of why he didn’t perform a miracle, if everything was under his control and he didn’t come down from the cross, then everyone would have believed in him. But Christ, according to Berdyaev, did not want to enslave people by miracle. He does not demand unconditional submission, he wants people to freely accept him and “love one another.” The singer of freedom - Nikolai Berdyaev forever entered the history of Russian philosophical thought and Russian culture, although he published many of his works abroad, where he spent more than a third of his life. N. Berdyaev, for example, in the book “The Origins and Meanings of Russian Communism” shows the deep difference between Russian literature and Western literature, finding it in “religious social agitation,” a premonition of disaster, and disbelief in the strength of civilization. He analyzes the works of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, proving that only in Russia could such literature be born that is akin to social philosophy. The second point is that only in Russia could literature have such a political and spiritual influence and turn into the ideological basis of social action. “Russian literature was born not from a joyful creative excess, but from the torment and suffering fate of man and people, from the search for universal salvation. But this means that the main motives of Russian literature were religious.”

After all, Dostoevsky came to religious views on life as a result of his search. He is sure that rebellion is inherent in the inner nature of man, but to overcome it in oneself is the moral task of the individual. And not scrapping and destruction is the true path to freedom, but humility and love. This has already been partially discussed when we talked about love as a purifying and all-conquering force using the example of Sonechka Marmeladova’s love for Raskolnikov.

Love resists rebellion, love humbles, love endures everything, etc. The most striking personification of love and humility can be considered two of Dostoevsky's heroes - Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov. Myshkin is pure and naive. He is ready to treat every person with whom fate encounters him in a brotherly manner, is ready to sympathize with his soul and share his suffering. The pain and feeling of rejection that Myshkin had known since childhood did not embitter him; on the contrary, they gave rise in his soul to a special, ardent love for people, for everything living and for everything that suffers. With his characteristic unselfishness and moral purity, which makes him related to Christ (Dostoevsky calls him “Prince Christ”), it is no coincidence that he “repeats” the path of Jesus, i.e. the path of suffering. However, Myshkin turns out to be helpless in his attempt to overcome the evil and disharmony surrounding him; he is unable to save Nastasya Filippovna, although he anticipates and foresees the outcome of Rogozhin’s love for her. Dostoevsky seems to be looking for the image of his positive hero, but he wants to see him strong and victorious. The honesty of the “outside observer” does not allow him to embellish reality, which, alas, does not accept the “ideal” and laughs at him. Just as the biblical Christ was persecuted and ridiculed, so Prince Myshkin is called an “idiot.”

The image of Alyosha Karamazov can be called a direct continuation of the image of Prince Myshkin in the works of Dostoevsky, with the difference that, being different in comparison with those around him, morally complete and whole, Myshkin is still rejected by people as something alien and defective; Alyosha is unconditionally accepted by all the heroes of the novel without exception. It is to him that they appeal as a judge, recognizing his moral superiority, his natural wisdom, dictated by the genuine love that has lived in him since childhood, by the brothers, Grushenka, Katerina Ivanovna, Ilyusha, even the wayward Kolya Krasotkin. "... everyone loved this young man, wherever he appeared, and this from his very childhood... he contained the gift of arousing special love for himself, so to speak, in nature itself, artlessly and directly." He was loved in the family where he grew up, his peers loved him, even his father, who seemed no longer capable of love, loved him. He did not remember insults, loved solitude and reading, was touchingly bashful and chaste, never supported conversations about women so beloved by boys at all times, for which he was nicknamed “the girl,” but this did not destroy the kind attitude of his comrades towards him. At the age of 20, he met Elder Zosima, “to whom he became attached with all the ardent first love of his insatiable heart.” This meeting determined his fate; he went to the monastery. He, unlike Myshkin, already directly takes the path of Christian service, the path of monasticism. Dostoevsky thereby probably wants to show that the rebellious search one way or another has its way out, either destruction and decay, or rebirth and purification through Christ. Unlike his followers - Camus, who sees no way out of the walls of the absurd, and Sartre, who claims that man is “condemned to be free,” Dostoevsky sees a way out of the meaninglessness of human existence. This solution is love and Christian service. Direct childlike, as Christ demands, acceptance of the kingdom of God, faith based on love. “All people are children,” this idea is heard in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor and other works of Dostoevsky. A new, positive pathos appears in the idea “All people are children” in the dying sermon not of the Grand Inquisitor, but of Elder Zosima. Explaining the biblical legend about the test of Job, Elder Zosima again turns to the topic of the loss of children. According to legend, in order to test Job, God strikes him with illness and takes away everything from him, including his children, but Job did not complain. “...and now he already has new children, and he loves them - Lord: “But how could he, it seemed, love these new ones, when those old ones are not there, when he has lost them? Remembering those, is it really possible to be happy in full, as before, with the new ones, no matter how dear the new ones may be to his heart?" But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief of the great secret of human life gradually turns into a tender, quiet joy; instead of the youth of boiling blood, a quiet one comes clear old age: I bless the sun’s coming out every day, and my heart still sings to it, but I love its sunset more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, meek, touching memories, sweet images from my entire long and blessed life - and on God’s truth, touching, reconciling, all-forgiving, is before everyone!” We are all children of God, and he loves us all, each in his own way, there is no need to grumble about life, because dirt does not stick to the “clean”. Father Zosima, and with him F.M., calls us to childlike purity of soul and sincerity of thoughts. Dostoevsky: “... ask God for fun. Be cheerful like children, like the birds of heaven... Flee, children, from this despondency,” he says to everyone present in his cell, and with them to all people on earth. Be like children! It is to this traditionally Christian idea that Dostoevsky comes and makes it one of his central ideas. Childhood as such is a symbol of purity, the highest reality, a source of the joy of being. For example, Dostoevsky describes in detail the conversation between Elder Zosima and a woman who had lost a child and was inconsolably suffering from it. “And don’t be consoled,” the elder tells her, “and you don’t need to be consoled, don’t calm down and cry, just every time you cry, remember steadily that your son is one of the angels of God, from there he looks at you and sees you and "He rejoices at your tears, and points them out to the Lord God. And this maternal crying will last for a long time, but in the end it will turn into quiet joy for you, and your bitter tears will be only tears of quiet tenderness and heartfelt cleansing, saving you from sins." The dead boy's name was Alexey. Is this coincidence of names - the God who sinlessly passed into another world in purity and who cleanses those who mourn for him, and the living Alyosha Karamazov, who brings joy and love to everyone around him, taking upon himself their sorrows and misfortunes? Probably not. The image of a crying mother can be considered as an image of humanity weeping due to its lost purity and sincerity, therefore the elder’s answer can be addressed to all people. The more we cry about the loss of what is pure, the more reliably we are protected from dirt and sin, penetrating and crippling our souls. That is why the elder says, “do not be comforted,” for we have no consolation, but there is joy in the memory of purity and innocence. It is in the “childhood”, spontaneity, all-conquering love and faith of Alyosha Karamazov that his strength lies, defeating evil. Faith and love fill human life with meaning and meaning. Dostoevsky comes to this conclusion, calling on readers to follow his heroes to find this path.