A writer's diary

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Pages from the Grahdanin and the diary of a writer

A writer's diary ( Russian : Дневник писателя; Dnewnik pisatelja ) is the title of a collection of non-fictional and fictional writings by Fyodor Dostoyevsky . They appeared from 1873 to 1874 in the magazine Graschdanin and from 1876 until Dostoyevsky's death (1881) as an independent magazine. Of all the works that Dostoevsky produced, the diary in its entirety is the most extensive. It was aimed at a large audience and very popular in its time.

history

Dostoyevsky began to write and publish the diary after Prince Vladimir Meshchersky had entrusted him with the editing of his conservative weekly Graschdanin in early 1873 . It appeared in the magazine at irregular intervals as a column and dealt with a wide range of political, religious and philosophical topics. Occasionally Dostoevsky also added prose texts, for example his short story Bobok in the sixth edition of the 1873 year . The diary proved immensely popular and Dostoevsky received a flood of letters to the editor after each issue.

After he resigned from the editing of the Grahdanin in April 1874, the diary did not appear again for the time being. From January 1876, however, Dostoevsky published it as an independent periodical and on his own account. His own literary works, which he published in his diary during this time , were the novella Die Gentle (November 1876) and the story Dream of a ridiculous person (April 1877).

Dostoyevsky's positions

In the diary , Dostoevsky presented his personal beliefs on a variety of topics that were discussed at the time.

Politically

In his younger years he had read Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin’s conservative history of the Russian state , whose philosophy later influenced him. Before his arrest, Dostoyevsky said: "I think the idea of ​​creating a republican government in Russia is stupid". In his diary in 1881 he wrote: "For the people, the tsar is not a foreign power, not the power of any conqueror ... but a power for the whole people, an all-united power as the people wish."

Critical of serfdom , he was also skeptical about the creation of a constitutional monarchy . He saw it as a concept that was not linked to the history of Russia. He said that the constitution would enslave people. Instead, he advocated social changes, for example the abolition of the feudal system and a weakening of the separation between the rural population and the influential classes. He represented a utopian, Christian Russia: "If all were pious Christians, not a single social question would arise ... they would take care of everything". He was an enemy of democracy and oligarchy : "the oligarchs are only concerned with wealth, the democrats with poverty." He was certain that political parties would fall apart. In the 1860s he discovered the Potschwennitschestw (about "back-to-the-ground movement"), a movement that resembled Slavophilia , was anti-European and rejected contemporary ways of thinking such as nihilism and materialism . In contrast to Slavophilism, the goal of Potschwennitschestvo was less an isolated Russia than something comparable to the reign of Peter the Great .

In an unfinished and unpublished article on which he had made notes in 1864/1865, Socialism and Christianity , Dostoevsky had argued that "civilization" (as "the second section of human history") was in decline, to the I move towards liberalism and consequently lose faith in God. He demanded that traditional Christianity should be restored. In his view, Western Europe “had the only formula for its God-given salvation and revelation, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself', through practical inferences such as ' Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous ' [Each for himself, God for all of us], or scientific slogans such as the principle of the ' struggle for survival ' ”are rejected.

Dostoevsky distinguished three “enormous world ideas” of his time: Roman Catholicism , Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy . He said that Catholicism carried on the traditions of the Roman Empire and became anti-Christian and proto-socialist as it was more interested in politics than religion. Socialism is "the newest incarnation of the Catholic idea" and its "natural ally". He considered Protestantism to be contradictory in itself. The ideal form of Christianity was Orthodoxy, more precisely the Russian tradition. Stefan Zweig described Dostoyevsky's ideas as follows: “Catholicism - a doctrine of the devil, a mockery of Christ, Protestantism - a rational belief in the state, all scorns of the only true belief in God; of the Russian Church. The Pope - Satan in tiara , our cities Babylon, the great whore of the Apocalypse . "

During the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–1878) Dostoevsky was convinced that wars were sometimes necessary to achieve redemption. He hoped for the collapse of the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the resurrection of the Christian Byzantine Empire . In addition, he hoped for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs and their unification with the Russian Empire.

Controversy: anti-Semitism

As an ardent supporter of the Orthodox faith, Dostoevsky had strong reservations about Catholics and Jews . In the diary this becomes clearer and more explicit than anywhere else. As a 22-year-old Dostoevsky had already considered writing a play by Jud Jankel , but it either wasn't finished or was lost. Jankel is an archetypal Jewish figure who Gogol had already featured in anti-Semitic drawings in his story Taras Bulba (1835). In Dostoyevsky's prose work, stereotypically drawn Jewish characters appeared repeatedly: first in Notes from a House of the Dead (Issai Fomitsch Bumstein), then in Crime and Punishment (Fireman Achilles) and finally in The Demons (Lyamschin). Passages in The Karamazov Brothers have also been interpreted as anti-Semitic.

An intimate knowledge of anti-Semitism Dostoevsky was Leonid Zypkin that during the preparatory work for his novel Summer in Baden-Baden in the diary extensively the paradox has traced how someone who demonstrates such sensitivity to human suffering in his novels, a whole group of people so could hate blindly. The Russian literary scholar Leonid Grossman provides an even more drastic picture , who in his book Confession of a Jew as early as 1924, with direct reference to Dostoyevsky, ruled that the “amalgamation of philosophical philosemitism with practical anti-Semitism” was “the lot of many thinkers” . Literary anti-Semitism has been demonstrated in the work of many Russian writers, from Pushkin to Gogol to Pasternak .

In 1981 the Swiss Slavist Felix Philipp Ingold attempted to defend Dostoyevsky . He argued that the diary had the same polyphonic character as the novels and that Dostoevsky had a very differentiated attitude towards Judaism. Indeed, there is some evidence that Dostoevsky struggled with his own anti-Semitism. With his assessment of the diary Ingold contradicted the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin , for whom it was clear that Dostoyevsky only verbalized ideas in it that he himself was convinced of.

The most extensive study of Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism to date was submitted by David I. Goldstein in 1981 . This found another important key in the novel The Demons . There Dostoyevsky formulated the conviction that messianic Orthodox Russia would assert itself victoriously against the decadent Western civilizations and bring about a resurrection of all humanity. If one wanted to declare the Russians to be the chosen people, it was more than obvious to discredit the Jews, who have made the same claim from old age, and to see them as fundamental adversaries. Steven Cassedy opposed Goldstein in 2005 by ruling that Dostoyevsky's understanding of religion was extraordinarily differentiated and that there was absolutely no binding religious program to be found in his work.

The question of Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism became particularly complex because the resemblance of Job's characters in the novel - their rebellious questions about the through no fault of their suffering - particularly appealed to Jewish readers.

Expenses (selection)

German:

  • A writer's diary . Edited and transmitted by Alexander Eliasberg. 4 volumes (1921–1923). Musarion, Munich.
  • Harry Harvest (Ed.): Dostojevski and Europe. From the "Diary of a Writer" . Rotapfel, Zurich 1951.
  • A writer's diary. Noted thoughts . Transferred from EK Rahsin (=  Series Piper . No. 409 ). 2nd Edition. Piper, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-492-20409-0 (first edition: 1963).
    • A writer's diary. Noted thoughts (=  Piper series . No. 5265 ). Unabridged paperback edition, 2nd edition. Piper, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-24270-7 .
  • Günter Dalitz, Michael Wegner (ed.): Diary of a writer. 1873 and 1876–1881. A selection. German version Günther Dalitz, with a foreword by Michael Wegner. 1st edition. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-351-02976-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Freeborn: Dostoevsky . Haus Publishing, London 2003, ISBN 1-904341-27-6 , pp. 109 .
  2. ↑ Reinhard Lauer : History of Russian Literature . From 1700 to the present. CH Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-50267-9 , p. 382 f .
  3. ^ Kenneth A. Lantz: The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia . Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut 2004, ISBN 0-313-30384-3 , pp. 38 ff .
  4. ^ Joseph Frank: Dostoevsky . The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2002, ISBN 0-691-11569-9 , pp. 201 .
  5. ^ Kenneth A. Lantz: The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia . Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut 2004, ISBN 0-313-30384-3 , pp. 225 .
  6. ^ Gary Saul Morson: The Boundaries of Genre . Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 1981, ISBN 0-292-70732-0 , pp. 4 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ Introduction to: Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Gentle Creature and Other Stories . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-955508-6 , pp. xv ( limited preview in Google Book Search). ; Joseph Frank: Dostoevsky . The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2002, ISBN 0-691-11569-9 , pp. 318 .
  8. ↑ a b c Lantz: The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia. 2004, pp. 183-189.
  9. ↑ a b c Lantz: The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia. 2004, pp. 323-327.
  10. ^ Lantz: The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia . 2004, p. 185.
  11. ↑ Stefan Zweig: Three Masters. P. 157.
  12. ^ Dostoevsky and the Jews, by David I. Goldstein. Retrieved November 5, 2013 . ; Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski: Autobiographical writings; Chapter 5: The beginning of his literary activity. Retrieved June 5, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol Biography . In: Nikolai Gogol (Ed.): Taras Bulba and Other Tales . MobileReference, 2009, p. 332 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  14. ↑ Michael R. Katz: Once More on the Subject of Dostoevsky and the Jews . In: Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Eds.): People of the Book . Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin 1996, ISBN 0-299-15010-0 , pp. 231-244, 236 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  15. ^ A b John Carver: Dostoevsky as an anti-Semite. Retrieved November 5, 2013 .
  16. ↑ The last hope. Retrieved November 4, 2013 . Die Zeit, March 29, 2006.
  17. ↑ a b c Job and Raskolnikow. Retrieved November 4, 2013 . Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 2, 2006; Leonid Grossman: The confession of a Jew in letters to Dostoyevsky . Piper, Munich 1927. The book was first published in the USSR in 1924.
  18. ^ Felix Philipp Ingold: Dostojewski and Judaism . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-458-04757-3 .
  19. ↑ In his foreword to Goldstein's book Dostoevsky and the Jews , Joseph Frank also argued that Dostoyevsky was a child of his time with his anti-Semitic remarks, but was not completely comfortable with these remarks.
  20. ↑ Michail Mikhailovich Bakhtin: Problems of Dostoevskij's Poetics . Munich 1971 (first edition: 1929).
  21. ^ David I. Goldstein: Dostoevsky and the Jews . University of Texas Press, Austin, TX 1981 .; Review: Dostoevsky and the Jews, by David I. Goldstein. Retrieved November 5, 2013 .
  22. ↑ Steven Cassedy: Dostoevsky's Religion . Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif 2005, ISBN 0-8047-5137-4 ( sup.org [accessed November 8, 2013] abstract).