Dostoyevsky as a laboratory of Ideas

This book aims at presenting and elucidating the most important themes in the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This is done neither through a critical interpretation of his texts nor a reconstruction of Dostoyevsky's Weltanschauung but through a detailed analysis of philosophical and metaphysical motifs permeating his novels. Accordingly, Dostoyevsky's works emerge as strongly dramatic insofar as their artistic form is not something inferior to the order of ideas but is itself the way in which the latter exists. One can also see in them a laboratory of ideas where the writer conducts a sort of vivisection of the fundamental human concepts and principles.

For Dostoyevsky, concepts and values do not constitute a sphere of ready answers and settled formulas but rather a sphere of contradictions and a perpetual dialectic of conflicting beliefs and points of view. As a matter of fact, he may be seen as an anthropological experimenter who establishes his own paradigmatic knowledge of man. The author of The Idiot was neither idebted nor held hostage to the vibrant philosophical and theological doctrines of his age; on the contrary, he posed his own questions and answered them in his own original way. Importantly, Dostoyevsky is presented not as a passive observer of ideas but someone who in his existential experience was their witness and sometimes even victim.

Thus viewed, his oeuvre reveals its strongly creative potential, with the novelist developing a positive vision of man - the vision which, contrary to the contemporary dicta of posthumanism, approaches man as a still unanswerable enigma to himself.