America as a Metaphor for Suffering Consciousness in Dostoevskii’s Fiction and Non-Fiction Works

Abstract

Dostoevskii’s journalistic writings exhibit America as a dangerous place of deception and seduction, a response to the role of America in the political consciousness of his day. At the same time, America appears in nearly all his major novels, including characters who threaten to “flee to America” and, in the case of Shatov and Kirillov from Demons, actually do. For Dostoevskii, the idea of “running off to America” elicits a dual symbolism: America was far enough away from Russia to enact a complete severing of roots (and, by extension, to serve as a metaphor for suicide), while also being profoundly dangerous in the closeness of the kinds of comparisons that could be drawn between Russian and American realities. In his fiction, America is more than a geographical concept; it serves as a reliable testing ground for suffering consciousness—for the intense self-reflection and repeated process of cognitively collecting the self for which Dostoevskii’s novels are so widely appreciated. In this article we trace the role of America across Dostoevsky’s body of work and across levels of literary discourse, with a focus on America as an occasion for philosophical reflection in the Kirillov-Shatov plotline in Demons. We highlight how the theme of America can bring one of the most complex and enduring questions of Dostoevskii’s work—the relationship between his journalistic and literary voices—into fuller relief, while also elucidating the narrative significance of America for the suffering consciousness and self-reflection so vital to his literary worlds.