The Brothers Karamazov in the Prism
of Hesychast Anthropology
Sergey Khoruzhy
Institute of Synergetic Anthropology, Moscow
Introduction: The Brothers Karamazov, The Elders and Hesychasm
It might seem that everything that can be written on Feodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has already been written long ago, but nevertheless everywhere in the world this novel continues to be studied and discussed again and again. There is no contradiction in this. We know that people will always turn to The Karamazovs and similar cultural phenomena, not so much for making great new discoveries about these works, as for getting help in discovering and understanding themselves. Such is the role or maybe even definition of truly classical phenomena: they are landmarks in the world of culture, which people of any time use in order to determine their own location in this world.
Any time and any cultural community address classical phenomena in their own way. They put their own questions to these phenomena, the questions that are most essential for them and for their self-determination. Choosing my subject, I would like to choose it among these essential questions: What is important in The Karamazovs for our time, for present-day people? The present-day situation, both Russian and global, social and cultural, tells us that the focus of these problems is concentrated in what is happening to the human person: in anthropology. Cardinal changes are taking place, which diverge sharply from classical anthropology. Man shows strong will and irresistible drive to extreme experiences of all kinds, including dangerous, asocial and transgressive ones. In such a situation, anthropological reflection is activated most intensively, hence it is the anthropology of The Karamazovs that comes to the foreground in the relation of modernity to Dostoevsky’s main novel. In no way was it always like this. The Russian Silver Age, plunging into Dostoevsky deeply and enthusiastically, looked in his works for metaphysics and theology, for prophecies and social and religious projects. Now such interest belongs to the past. Today we are interested, in the first place, in Man’s image or anthropological model embodied in the novel.