Fyodor Dostoevsky's Ideological Views on the Place of Poland in Russia and in the World

The article addresses the problems of positioning the Polish state on an imaginary map of the world of the outstanding Russian writer, philosopher and journalist Fyodor Dostoevsky. This publication is an analysis of Dostoevsky's statements and judgments about the place of Poland in Russia and in the world from fiction and journalistic literature, criticism, letters and diary entries. The work is divided into three parts. The introduction formulates the reasons for Dostoevsky's attention to the Polish problem, substantiates the relevance of the study on the basis of reference to the historiography of the issue, determines the subject and method of research. In the main part, the author examines the image of Poland that was formed in Dostoevsky's works. The features of the writer's approach to determining the place of Poland on an imaginary map of the world are identified. The emphasis is placed on the heterogeneity of the definition of the term “Poland”, for which the epithets used by the writer are given: old and new, aristocratic and folk, Latin and Slavic, Catholic and Russian. Dostoevsky's approach to the possibility of the existence of Russia and Poland within the framework of a single state is analyzed; the approach consisted in the perspective of creating the Pan-Slavic empire, including the West Slavic Catholic peoples. In the final part of the article, the author concludes that Dostoevsky's position on determining the place of Poland on the world map seems to be rather contradictory. On the one hand, the writer points in many ways to the complexity and even impossibility of the coexistence of Russia and Poland within one state due to the existing contradictions between the two civilizations which can be overcome only by assimilation, that is, by the destruction of the remnants of Old Poland. On the other hand, Dostoevsky regards the Polish lands as an integral part of the empire, although their inclusion, which happened in an “artificial” way, was ahead of its time. Only after the formation and the development of a united Orthodox empire would Western Slavs have been able to naturally integrate into the common Pan-Slavic empire.

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