War of the Underground: Dostoevsky’s Paradoxical Approach to War and the Sin of Cain

• In Event: Orthodox Christianity and War: Religious Narratives of Violence, Memory, and (Self)Justification in Russia

Abstract

Dostoevsky investigates the moral and theological consequences of war in A Writer’s Diary in an entry entitled “The Paradoxicalist,” where he lays out a vision of war that is not only just, but useful. However, through his dialogic composition and by branding his interlocutor with the same epithet he labeled his Underground Man, Dostoevsky strategically distances himself from this position. This paper examines Dostoevsky’s writings on the “Eastern Problem” and the 1877 Russo-Turkish War, alongside selections from his post-Siberian fiction, to investigate his position on war in relation to his Orthodox theological perspectives as well as his inchoate ethnophyletism.

Author

• Peter G Winsky, U of Southern California