Abstract
Drawing on the Second Discourse and the Social Contract and Notes from Underground and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” this essay examines the striking similarities and fundamental differences between Dostoevskij’s and Rousseau’s treatment of the problem of individual vs. society and their notions of ideal social relations. The essay investigates Rousseau’s attempt to absorb morality into politics and “to concretize” Diderot’s universal moral man into citizen. It also suggests that Dostoevskij takes Rousseau’s attempt at concretization a step further by exposing humanist conceptions of man and society in general as fiction and creating a model of ideal society that absorbs morality, not into politics (as does Rousseau’s model), but into the sanctity of the Word.
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Notes
Grigor’ev says, for instance, that Dostoevkij perfected the genre of conte philosophique, continuing the best traditions of Voltaire (1996: 89).
Walter Kaufmann states, “I can see no reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist, but I do think that Part One of Notes from Underground is the best overture for existentialism ever written. With inimitable vigor and finesse the major themes are stated here that we can recognize when reading all the other so-called existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus” (1989: 14).
According to Lotman, Dostoevsky was “irresistibly drawn to Rousseau, but he fought this attraction and argued his whole life with [him]” (1969: 603).
See Barran 2002 for a discussion of the fate of Rousseau’s works (including the Second Discourse and the Social Contract) in Russia. Barran provides a lot of interesting information on Russian translations and receptions of Rousseau. In the Appendices to the book, one can find “Summary of Rousseau’s Social Contract in Jakov Kozel’skij’s Philosophical Propositions (1768)” (pp. 325–330) and “Pavel Potemkin’s Preface to His Russian Translation of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1770)” (pp. 331–338). Dostoevskij, as is well known, knew French well and could read Rousseau in the original.
In discussing the discrepancy between the original and Dostoevskij’s use of it, Fink says: “Given Dostoevsky’s frequent allusions to Rousseau’s Confessions in his writings, it would seem likely that he knew the correct phrase, in which case the question would arise as to why he might deliberately misrepresent Rousseau’s thought to suggest a level of abstraction—l’homme vs. un homme—not apparent in the original. In his effort to separate himself from Rousseau, Dostoevsky perhaps sought to depict the latter in the most unfavorable light by placing him side-by-side with the utopian socialists, all advocates, in Dostoevsky’s mind, of the abstraction/dehumanization of man as a piano key of natural necessity” (2004: 277).
The Geneva Manuscript includes about half of the final version of the Social Contract as well as some passages that Rousseau chose to omit. Chapter 2 of book I is one of the chapters omitted from the final version. See Rousseau 1959–1990: vol. 3, p. 281.
Grigor’ev shows that the imagery of a piano-key was most probably borrowed by Dostoevskij from Diderot (1966: 97).
The huge glass and iron building, the Crystal Palace, was originally erected in Hyde Park in London to house the Great Exhibition in 1851. Chernyshevskij used the imagery of the crystal palace in What Is to Be Done? as a metaphor for the perfect society of the future.
Si malheureusement cette forme n’est pas trouvable, et j’avoue ingénument que je crois qu’elle ne l’est pas, mon avis est qu’il faut passer à l’autre extrémité, et mettre tout d’un coup l’homme autant au-dessus de la loi qu’il peut l’être, par consequent établir le despotisme arbitraire...“ (Rousseau, 1924: 157).
Instead of Magarshack’s “genuine sensibility” I give here “genuine consciousness” (pravil’noe soznanie).
Thus Fink argues that “The Dream” and the Second Discourse have in common “three aspects of mankind’s evolution: the essence of man’s goodness; the essence of his downfall; and the means of salvation” (2004: 281). The comparison between the treatment of these issues in Dostoevskij and Rousseau can only go so far because Rousseau approaches them from a primarily biological point of view, whereas Dostoevskij reverses the priorities, so to speak, by treating the biological as absorbed into the spiritual. This reversal is significant.
This quote comes from Dostoevsky’s notebooks to The Devils.
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Stuchebrukhov, O. “Ridiculous” dream versus social contract: Dostoevskij, Rousseau, and the problem of ideal society. Stud East Eur Thought 59, 101–117 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9025-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9025-8