Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons,” the character Shatov articulates a surprisingly relativist, even multicultural idea: every people or nation creates its own god, its own morality. These gods manifest themselves as grand historical ideas: art, philosophy, the state, religion. This almost post-modern multi-culturalism, however, only serves as basis for imperialistic messianism: “If a great people does not believe that the truth is only to be found in itself alone…; if it does not believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest by its truth, it would at once sink into being ethnographical material, and not a great people.” Dostoevsky was not merely observing human pretension in this line, but grounding his own belief in a messianic Russia that would redeem the (in his mind) decadent, materialistic West, and thereby transcend its status as mere “ethnographic material”—its precarious position as an “enlightened” European imperial power that was itself “colonized” by European values, culture, and institutions. Most people overlook Dostoevsky as a globally-oriented thinker, but his engagement with global affairs and the debate over national identity was crucial to his political theology. His messianic sensibility was ugly, war-mongering, and anti-Semitic. He advocated a crusade against the Ottomans not only as a last-ditch humanitarian effort to liberate Orthodox Balkan Christians, but also as a welcome opportunity to recapture Constantinople for Christendom. He penned anti-Semitic tirades on the status in statu of Russian Jews who apparently did not want any part in his Christian vision. His thought proved highly influential in nineteenth century Russian intellectual life and has experienced a resurgence in the post-Soviet world. Whereas most scholars cordon his militarism from his Christian ideas, my paper explores the degree to which the two are connected. Behind the beautiful Christian vision of Dostoevsky’s fiction, we can detect an ugly principle: the communion of believers redeems itself by violently excluding others. I investigate the violent contradictions of Dostoevsky’s political theology and his obsessive desire for universal Christian salvation and harmony that is premised, paradoxically, on this principle of exclusion.