XIII. Interiority and Intersubjectivity in Dostoevsky: The Vasya Shumkov Paradigm

Abstract

Indwelling Self/Relational Self Among studies of Dostoevsky’s conception of personality, two largely incompatible and equally influential schools of thought can be discerned. On the one hand, Dostoevsky has been read as a neo-Romantic “expressivist” who situated the roots of the personality, and of the world itself, in the inexhaustible depths of the “human soul.”1 The elder Zosima’s teaching in The Brothers Karamazov on the organic nature of the personality whose roots “touch other worlds” provides a vivid illustration of this view: Zosima describes our “secret innermost sensation” of a “connection with . . . a celestial and higher world,” and our sense that “the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in those other worlds” (PSS, 14:291).2 It was in this mystical Romantic vein that Vladimir Solovyov