Conceptualizing religious discourse in the work of Fëdor Dostoevskij

Svetlana Klimova

pp. 55-64

in: Robert Bird (ed), Dostoevskij's significance for philosophy and theology, Studies in East European Thought 59, 2007.

Abstract

I interpret Dostoevskij's religious concepts in terms of mythogenesis and mythopoesis. Dostoevskij's religious concepts arose on the basis both of his personal emotional experience and of the discourse of popular Orthodoxy. They demonstrate the antinomial nature of Russian spirituality, and are typified by his conception of the family, which illustrates the communal basis of the individual personality. The antimomial idea of the family is most fully developed in Dostoevskij's novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the four models of fatherhood correspond to Isaac the Syrian's concepts of physical, spiritual, mental and divine fatherhood.

Cited authors

Dostoevskij Fedor