DOSTOEVSKY'S RELIGIOSITY AS A METHODOLOGICAL PROBEM OF SOVIET LITERARY CRITICISM

Soviet literary criticism, especially in the first decades after the 1917 Revolution, was quite biased in its treatment of Dostoevsky and his works. The reasons for this bias lie both inside and outside the sphere of political ideology. We suggest that there exists a genetic link between some Soviet readings of Dostoevsky and a number of interpretations made in the author's lifetime. Also analysed are the attempts to 'domesticate' Dostoevsky and adapt his works to drastically different cultural conditions and political norms. It is indicative that this adaptation has always passed the stage of mythologizing the writer and his works. This mythologization paradoxically became a convergence point for Soviet (Lunacharsky), anti-Soviet (Berdyayev) and purely philosophical (Bakhtin) readings of Dostoevsky. Ultimately, the central Dostoevsky myth in post-revolutionary Russia was a version of Romantic mythology often directly expressed in comparing Dostoevsky with Prometheus. We also look at the negative readings of Dostoevsky, which construed the author as a certain mythological antagonist of the proletariat as the collective messiah. Such readings (exemplified in our article by Pereverzev's and Livshits') point at the ultimate limit of ethical assessment of Dostoevsky from the standpoint of rational secular humanism and the Soviet humanitarian thought as its version. Dostoevsky's artistic practice incorporates this tradition within the intranovel dialogue as just one of the voices and demonstrates its ethical insufficiency, which in its turn provokes the mixed reaction of 'appropriation' and 'rejection' from both Soviet thinkers and their contemporary heirs.