The “American discourse” of Dostoevsky

The article examines the “American discourse” in Dostoevsky’s fiction and journalism. Dostoevsky is known as one of the founders of the “Russian idea” concept, a writer who advocated the preservation of national values in the face of possible Western interventions. Alongside the West, he saw America as the most important opponent of Russian identity. If Dostoevsky’s development of the idea of “native soil” functioned as a third node beyond the Slavophile-Westernizer binary, so too did America complicate the narrative of Russia vs the West. If Russia and Europe shared a common past-Dostoevsky’s contemporaries had all been raised on the culture and philosophy of Europe, and many had even been educated there-Russia and America had no such shared past. Russian intellectuals and writers of the period all agreed that America was not Europe, and it was not the West. America was a new concept coming into philosophical being, a concept which would capture the literary and philosophical imagination of Dostoevsky and his contemporaries, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The American discourse begins with references to the name of Columbus, vividly described in the idea of fleeing or threatening flight (begstvo meaning both escape and the act of flight); it becomes synonymous with death and the mythologem of hell in Dostoevsky’s literary texts. At the same time, America becomes a metaphor for the manifestation of a suffering consciousness, whose phenomenological analysis is connected in Dostoevsky’s discourse with the image of the “rootless intelligentsia,” the consciousness-disease of the underground man. Leaving such a person in a state of submerged consciousness, “bracketing” all the external circumstances of his life, Dostoevsky shows his doom in the search for the universal meaning of life. The room of America, where he places some of his sufferers, makes this hopelessness evident (figurative) and obvious, from the writer’s point of view. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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