Sociology of the Present: Reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot Through a Hegelian Lens

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Abstract This article takes Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History as an analytic framework to interpret Dostoevsky’s representation of a turbulent period of social change in 1860s Russia in his novel The Idiot. The paper shows that Dostoevsky engaged with Hegel’s philosophical constructs and understood them well enough to render them powerfully through artistic form of expression. It leads to the insight that Dostoevsky and Hegel were contemporaries in thought: both sought to create a new reader with a new sensibility about individual and social freedom, emerging in the post-Enlightenment period. Whilst Hegel may not have considered Russia to have entered World History, it is argued that this view was short-sighted and that Dostoevsky’s efforts highlight the complexity and nuance of this period of rapid social and political change in Russia of the 1860s.