The Italian question in the “Foreign events” of the weekly “Grazhdanin” (“The citizen”): F. M. Dostoevsky on Vatican policy

The article provides an analysis of texts by F. M. Dostoyevsky, in which he as editor and author of the “Foreign Events” column in the weekly “The Citizen” analyzed desperate attempts of the Roman pontiff Pius 9th to regain the secular power in the young Italian kingdom, which he had lost in 1870. The writer’s complex attitude towards Italian Old Catholics is considered against the background of their dialogue with the Holy Synod and the coverage of the Correspondence of the Prior of the Roman Embassy Church Archimandrite Alexander with Metropolitan Isador, the first Metropolitan of the Holy Synod. On the one hand, Dostoevsky appreciates the old Catholics’ intention to pass into the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, on the other hand, he sympathizes with the persecuted Catholic clerics. Describing their attempts to restore the secular power of Pius 9th, Dostoevsky links their actions with the pontiff’s claim to world domination, about whose danger he warns as emphatically in the weekly as in his works, comparing his attack to the Apocalypse, and his very identity with the Antichrist. According to the writer, France’s support for the politics and the papal throne of Pius 9th holds a threat of a military clash between France and Germany.