From “Legend” to “Mystery”: how V. Rozanov made F. Dostoevsky a writer of the 20th century

Abstract

The article considers the evolution of Vasily V. Rozanov’s views on the literary work of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky. If in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (1891), which became a signi­fi­cant milestone in the history of the inter­pre­tation of Dostoevsky’s novels in Russian philo­sophical culture, Rozanov tried to adequately reproduce the author’s position, noting, that the chapter on the Grand Inquisitor should be re­gar­ded as key not only for understanding the philo­sophical and ideological content of The Brothers Karamazov, but also for compre­hen­ding the basic intent of Dostoevsky’s entire oeuvre, then later, towards the end of the 19^th century, he took a fundamentally different po­si­tion in relation to the Russian writer. Namely, Ro­zanov began to argue that the questions posed in Dostoevsky’s novels might and should be answered in terms of the problem of gender, the justification of the sacredness and trans­cen­dence of which became Rozanov’s main task. In this connection, the article draws attention to Rozanov’s work Mystery. From the Writer’s Notebook, which was not published during his lifetime. In this essay, Rozanov actively dis­cusses the transcendence of gender, analyzing the works of various writers and thinkers, among whom Dostoevsky is central. Here in Rozanov’s reasoning one can notice a steady tendency towards “decontextualization”, i.e. to interpreting a literary work in isolation from the historical context in which it was written. This, in turn, inevitably led to “supersemantization”, or en­dowing the work with redundant and not directly derived meanings. However, the author stresses, it is these very tendencies – towards “de­contextualization” and “super­se­man­ti­ci­za­tion” – that determined the development of li­te­rary criticism in the 20^th century. It is co­n­clu­ded that Rozanov was one of the first literary critics to start this tradition.