Information about the author:
Denis A. Zhernokleyev
Denis A. Zhernokleyev, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt Place, 2301, TN 37240 Nashville, USA.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6704-0842
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Abstract:
This article examines Vyacheslav Ivanov’s account of form in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels, focusing on his essay “Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy” (1911). For Ivanov, the tragic is an antinomic tension that permeates every level of novelistic form and resists reduction to psychological or ideological terms. His analysis turns on three antinomies: suffering, beauty, and faith. These antinomies do not constitute successive stages, yet their order gives direction to Ivanov’s argument, leading from a Hegelian ethical understanding of suffering to an Augustinian anthropology of transensus. This movement reveals the theological purpose of Ivanov’s reading of Dostoevsky, which belongs to a larger project of returning art to its religious foundations.
