Defenders of Brother Slavs" and the controversy about them in L.N. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and F.M. Dostoevsky's A Writer's Diary

Volunteering movement in support of the liberation war of the Balkan peoples against the Ottoman Empire was an important phenomenon of the national identity and trans-Slavic cooperation in the 1870-s. In Anna Karenina, L.N. Tolstoy is rather skeptical about this movement, while Dostoevsky, who sees this support as something that raises the soul, Tolstoy and his characters for their position. This is essential for understanding the views of the great Russian writers as well as for describing the processes of the national and common Slavic identity of the period. Tolstoy's characters argue about whether volunteerism is a real expression of the people's hopes and whose potential interests it expresses. Tolstoy and his hero refuse to accept the dominant ideological interpretation: they assume that behind the facade there should be another truth hidden. The writer makes a specific deconstruction which is to some extent corresponds the principles of post-colonial studies, which took shape in the late 20th century. Dostoevsky offers a literal interpretation of the publicly declared high ideological sense of what is happening and blames those who deny the very possibility of noble intentions in politics. Both the writer connect their literary, if not life, mission with deep spiritual processes of the national life, so the problem of the adequate model matters much for them. Since the days of the naturalist school, Dostoevsky has been struggling with the model of the truth as an explication of the hidden motive and revelation of the secret seamy side. In the episode about the movement in support of the Balkan Slavs he tries to build a model of a more complex and multi-dimensional truth (regardless of whether he is right or wrong in his assessment of this particular episode of the ideological history). Tolstoy generally permits the applicability of skeptical deconstruction to the majority of modern life phenomena. However, he holds the possibility of a truly high sense of spiritual life, of a miracle, like World War I (as we see it in his War and Peace). It is only necessary to distinguish the genuine from the huge number of fakes and simulations. Tolstoy searches for the genuine in the same area of implicit and profound that is hidden from both the naive victims of manipulation, who take the ideological fajade of reality for the truth, and from the skeptics, who choose the total deconstruction.

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