Dostoevsky’s “Foreign Events” Cycle in the Context of the European Issues of “The Citizen” 1873–1874

F. M. Dostoevsky’s “Foreign Events” cycle of articles published in the weekly “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”) from 1873–1874 remains one of the writer’s least studied works. Its understanding is possible only through contextual analysis, that is, by comparing it with other publications in this periodical on current events in Europe and their historical background. The proposed research methodology assumes the collective nature of editorial work. In this case, Dostoevsky acts as both the author and the editor, coordinating the formation of the publication’s overall position. The foreign policy stance of “Grazhdanin” was built, as shown in the article, by publications by S. A. Nikolaevsky, V. P. Meshchersky, F. I. Tyutchev, K. P. Pobedonostsev, and N. N. Strakhov, and then condensed in Dostoevsky’s “Foreign Events” series. As a result, “The Citizen” led its reader to an understanding of the true roots of the political crisis unfolding at that time in European countries. The destructive processes in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Austria (the rupture between power and people, the secession of political parties, the triumph of the state over the church, the exhaustion of national unity, which escalated into chaos and turmoil, the loss of traditional values), as the publication’s authors and then the editor himself demonstrate, stem from an ongoing mental breakdown, expressed primarily in Europe’s growing alienation from Christianity. For the first time, the sense of an ongoing civilizational upheaval, interpreted by Dostoevsky as the manifestation of an anti-Christian “evil spirit,” was expressed so acutely and openly in journalism.