The ideas of the German idealist philosophers were very much in the air: Russian intellectuals were profoundly shaken by the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx and others, and Raskolnikov’s ‘exceptional man’ is something of a brutalized reading of Hegel’s world historical figure.
(There is some irony in the fact that this very idea is borrowed from German Romantic thought.)ĭostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and in his other great tragedies responds also to the European philosophical context of his time. The rival Slavophiles meanwhile protested that Russia should instead ‘look to the people,’ and find roots in local folk tradition. the 13 th Amendment in 1865 and the Civil War.) The burning question of Dostoevsky’s day-arguably facing Russia even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries-remained: is Russia European or not? Should it be? The faction of the so-called Westernizers continued the older aristocratic trends of speaking French at home, dressing in the latest London fashions, or completing educations abroad. (There are parallels and telling contrasts with American history of the same period: cf. Under Alexander II, Russia emancipated the serfs bloodlessly in 1861 and passed other progressive Great Reforms that sought to ‘catch Russia up to’ Western Europe.
In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the so-called intelligentsia, educated classes began to view the great divide from the people ( raskol or split: the word is also used in reference to religious sectarians, who came to be called Old Believers) as a great historical tragedy. The upper classes were dramatically divided from the peasantry: quite literally, the different social castes did not speak the same language. As a result, Russian culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries essentially grafted Western European culture onto an agrarian, Christian Orthodox state. In the eighteenth century Russia gradually began to ‘join’ Europe, especially under the reign of Peter the Great, seen as Russia’s great (or terrible) Westernizer. In consequence, Russia did not partake in the Renaissance, nor of course in the Reformation or Counter-Reformation.
(Wikimedia Commons) Historical & Political ContextĪfter the devastation of Kievan Rus’ by Turkic tribes and its fall to the ‘Mongol yoke,’ the Russian region developed in isolation from Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Russian Empire at its greatest extent in 1865.
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