Поэма Ивана Карамазова «Великий инквизитор»: отклик Достоевского на протест архимандрита Феодора (А.М. Бухарева)

Abstract

The article suggests that the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” in F.M. Dosto­evsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, which raises the question of the ne­cessity/undesirability of strict administration in the field of church and social life, is a reflection of the views of Archimandrite Theodore (A.M. Bukharev), for his protests against the infringement of the human right to choose a religious model and social freedom subjected to bullying by conservative circles. In a num­ber of his books throughout the 1860s Bukharev insisted on the need to abandon authoritarianism, he questioned the inviolability of church dogmas in favor of a free spiritual search of a person not constrained by restrictions. Contempo­raries, including A.I. Herzen, commenting on this issue, spoke of Bukharev’s persecutors from the Synod and the “Domashnaya beseda” magazine (The Home Conversation) as “inquisitors” who dealt with the philosopher in the same way as the Spanish religious police did. Bukharev’s main idea was the need for the country and the whole world to move from the generally accepted Old Testament model of political and trade relations between people based on the idea of “an eye for an eye” to benevolent positive ties based on the principle of brotherly love, commanded by Jesus Christ. Dostoevsky laid this idea at the foundation of the ideology of “pochvennichestvo”, as was reported in the “Announcement” about the publication of the magazine “Time”, the organ of the socio-cultural project created by him. The motives and the basic structure of Bukharev’s logic, the idea of the saving power of Christian love, were used by Dostoevsky in all his works written after Bukharev’s death. It was used with the greatest force in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” for modern readers at the level of hidden allusion, and for contemporaries it was done in the form of an open allusion.