Dostoevsky and Bakhtin: A Clash of Worldviews

Abstract

The article discusses contradictions between Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s worldviews. Due to the concept “polyphonic novel” put forward by Bakhtin, many interesting observations were made on the poetics and ideological content of Dostoevsky’s works, but over time, there were reveled numerous contradictions that caused justified criticism from experts on Dostoevsky’s writings. Analysis of this criticism suggests that the reason for the revealed contradictions is the conflict between Dostoevsky’s and Bakhtin’s worldviews. It is known that throughout his life the writer was an Orthodox Christian who consciously and consistently expressed his religious beliefs in his works, while Bakhtin studied Dostoevsky’s works from the standpoint of his own worldview that combined elements of the socioeconomic teachings of Karl Marx, neo-Kantianism, and non-canonical Christianity. According to the author of the article, such philosophical eclecticism was characteristic of public consciousness in Russia in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Bakhtin vividly expressed it in his theoretical constructions using the examples of a number of artists and thinkers of his time, but it appears that he was wrong in applying it to Dostoevsky’s works. Bakhtin believed that the writer also had not a holistic but dichotomous consciousness, in which objective social reality was reflected, which then was embodied in the artistic form of a “polyphonic” novel. According to the author of the article, Dostoevsky had a holistic worldview based on the Orthodox faith and therefore saw the causes of negative social phenomena not in economic relations, but in people’s departure from traditional spiritual and moral values preserved by Orthodoxy. Bakhtin ignored this fact and explained the peculiarities of Dostoevsky’s poetics from his own ideological positions, which led to many contradictions in his judgments.