The Main Trends in the Contemporary F. M. Dostoevsky Studies

Abstract

This survey article is devoted to Russian and foreign individual and collective monographs about Dostoevsky published over the recent three years (2017–2019). It contains a rather detailed bibliography of such publications; some of them are analyzed in detail. A number of new biographical materials are presented, which have been recently published recently and have significantly enriched our understanding of the writer’s life. Particular attention is paid to works of hermeneutic and psychoanalytical nature, in which new approaches to Dostoevsky are outlined. Many of them, according to the author, can serve as an excellent illustration of how the tools, borrowed from the famous works of Mikhail Bakhtin, increasingly find themselves unsuited to Dostoevsky’s artistic thought. In the work, some methodological principles for conducting comparative studies dealing with source criticism are also formulated and demonstrated through examples. According to the article, a breakthrough in the Dostoevsky studies might occur only on the basis of a downright dismissal of all the prisms alien to the writer’s thought, through which it became customary to investigate him, including not only the Marxist and structuralist perspectives, but also the Orthodox Christian and Bakhtinian ones.