Dostoevsky as an artist of a godless world

Abstract

The article offers a view of Dostoevsky as an artist of a godless world. The author distingueshes Dostoevsky's Christian worldview from the artistic image of the world that the writer created in his works. In Dostoevsky's artistic world, Christianity is only a dream and a hope, not real life. Only a few of Dostoevsky's characters aspire to it, but the vast majority of them live as if Christ did not exist. The Christian reality is transcendent to Dostoevsky's godless world and only occasionally touches it from outside as a kind of revelation. In this world the external must be overcome by the internal, but this is only possible as a result of experiencing this "external" within oneself, with all its sins and temptations. This is why Dostoevsky's world is even more godless and fearful than the world in which he lived was in fact. And this is also natural, because the only way to find a way out of it is to reach the last depths of Satanism. Dostoevsky's texts are originally addressed to secular people, to religiously ignorant intellectuals, but not to convinced Christians. This is also the reason for the perception of Dostoevsky's works by various types of readers. The article proposes the notion of a "gnostic myth" about Dostoevsky, the creation of which is characteristic of modern intellectuals. It is shown that for the adherents of the "gnostic myth", immersion into the world of Dostoevsky creates the illusion of "spiritual life" and intellectual chosenness, replacing the religious life with an artistic illusion. Dostoevsky is a man shaped by a millennium of Russian Christian culture, abandoned in the godless world of the 19th century intelligentsia.  The godless world prophetically depicted by Dostoevsky is the world of the twenty-first century, in which "demons" rule, and this is his main artistic achievement.