ABSTRACT
The critic and publicist Nikolai Strakhov reminisces that he once called
Dostoevsky an unconscious (bessoznatelnyi) Slavophile. Whenever he remarked
to the novelist that the Slavophiles had also expressed an idea of his, Dostoevsky
would reply that he did not know that.1 Dostoevsky’s relationship to the
Slavophiles and their philosophy was always ambivalent and, in my view,
extraordinarily complex. In the early 1860s through his journals Vremia and
Epokha he entered into debates and polemics as much with the Slavophile camp
as with the Westernizers. But as Dostoevsky grew older, it appears that he
gradually realized that there was a growing affinity between his ideas and those
of the most prominent figures of early Slavophilism, especially Alexei
Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. This engagement with the Slavophiles in fact
began remarkably early in his career and lasted all his life, continually growing
in importance long after the movement itself had died out. However, he refrained
from any outright declaration of allegiance. His writings tease us with the
elusiveness of such ironic pronouncements as ‘Confessions of a Slavophile’
from Diary of a Writer (XXV, 195-96), so that, as is typical of Dostoevsky, we
are unable categorically to fix a label upon him. We may not call Dostoevsky a
Slavophile, although many of his contemporaries, like Strakhov, might implicitly
have regarded him as such. And yet the latter was right that there is much that
echoes Slavophilism in Dostoevsky’s works.
