Irony and Utopia in Herzen and Dostoevsky: From the Other Shore and Diary of a Writer

Abstract

In Diary of a Writer Dostoevsky records that, on visiting Herzen in London in 1862, he praised From the Other Shore, Herzen's philosophical meditation on the revolutionary defeat of 1848, expressed primarily through a series of dialogues with an imaginary opponent. What he liked most about the book, Dostoevsky told Herzen, was that your opponent is also very clever, and that many a time he has driven you into a corner.1 There has been much commentary on the echoes of Herzen's writings in Dostoevsky's work,2 but only one critic has focussed on the resemblance between the dialogical structures of Diary of a Writer and From the Other Shore. In his illuminating study of the Diary, whose structure he believes to have been primarily inspired by Herzen's work, Gary Saul Morson observes that the two works represent similar dialogues of utopia and antiutopia, faith and doubt-typical of all such encounters in