“On the European Events of 1854”: Dostoevsky in a Dialogue with Contemporary Poets on “Holy Russia”

Abstract

The major focus of the research is the content of the “Holy Russia” concept in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s poem “On the European Events of 1854”, analyzed in the context of the writer’s creative biography, as well as in the “big” context of historic, military, and political events of 1854, and the wave of poems evolved in Russian literature in response to these events. The author argues that, by the beginning of the Crimean war in 1854, Dostoevsky acquired a new understanding of himself, the Russian people, and Russia. This new understanding had, at its core, the notion of Christ’s absolute holiness, of inner connection between a person and a person through compassionate Christian love as an undoubted value, of vibrant pulse of this love in the Russian heart. No wonder, then, that the poem “On the European Events of 1854” - written by Dostoevsky in March 1854 and devoted to the political, historic, and religious situation connected with the Crimean War - comprises significant motifs characteristic of the writer’s mature works (primarily, the motif of holiness of Russian people’s ideals) and, thus, cannot be considered simply an expression of the author’s loyalty to the tsar and those in power. Two literary contexts - of military-patriotic poetry and of Slavophile poems devoted to the Crimean War - allow distinguishing between the common topics and the author’s voice in the poem. The text has three distinct parts: the first is profoundly innovative, both in the form and content, while the second and third ones basically follow the samples of Slavophile and military-patriotic poetry, correspondingly. The peculiarity of the “Holy Russia” concept, actualized in the first part of the poem, is determined by its involvement with the image of a “little man”, on the one hand, and by the significance of the motifs of self-sacrifice, sufferings, Christian love and faith, on the other. The name “Holy Russia” corresponds here to the Russian people’s historic way of shaping the state and defending it as a truly national value; it expresses the basis of the “Russian spirit”: self-sacrifice; Orthodox notions; respect for such holy things as family and motherland, the tsar and the state; the Russian people’s belief in a sort of special connection with the Lord. The analysis of the way the name “Rus’ ” functions in Dostoevsky’s other “Crimean” poem - “On the First of July 1855” - verifies the hypothesis that the writer’s concept of “Holy Russia” was formed in his poems devoted to the Crimean War.