Достоевский - Страхов - Толстой: к истории одного конфликта

Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Философия. 2021. Т. 25. № 1. С. 72–88.

Klimova S.

The well-known epistolary conflict between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai
Strakhov over the latter's slander of the great Russian writer's terrible sins is considered in the
article from the point of view a philosophical anthropology and relations not two but between
three participants of this story: Dostoyevsky, Strakhov and Tolstoy. This conflict is presented
through anthropological, existential, and class prisms of description, based on a reconstruction
of Strakhov's concept of man as a controversial, dual, and undefined being reflected in
Dostoevsky's work. A direct relation between the definition of the dual nature of man in the
works of Strakhov and Dostoevsky and interpersonal conflicts within "boundary forms of
literature" is substantiated. Special attention is paid to the class of seminarians, the object of
Dostoevsky's targeted criticism. He saw their worst characteristics in Strakhov personality.
Tolstoy plays the role of an arbiter in this controversy, assessing the situation both in terms of
literary, existential and religious thought. In the course of his examination of this conflict, his
unexpected closeness to Dostoevsky was discovered in regard to assessment of Strakhov. The
point of their coincidence was the "pink Christianity" of the writers, who justify man in a quite
similar manner, in terms of their religious consciousness.

Keywords: Достоевский, Leo Tolstoy, природа человека, переписка, human nature, correspondence, Толстой, F. Dostoevsky, N. Strakhov, Н.Н. Страхов