The legacy of F. M. Dostoevsky as the pinnacle of orthodox realism

The works by F. M. Dostoevsky is a phenomenon whose relevance does not decrease, but rather increases over time. The author of the article sees the reason for this phenomenon in a special combination of the writer’s worldview and talent. Having creatively comprehended the experience of Orthodox literature, Dostoevsky created a special artistic method that allowed him to expound fully and without distortion the divinely revealed truth preserved by Orthodoxy by means of the modern Russian literary language. The writer himself called his method “complete realism”, “realism in the highest sense”, but today there is every reason to call it “Orthodox realism”. The main task of this method is to reliably depict interaction of the inner spiritual world of a person with the external spiritual world. An important feature of the Orthodox worldview is its sobornost’ (catholicity), therefore, in Dostoevsky’s works, the question of the fate of one person is inseparably linked with the question of the fate of all the Russian people. The writer introduces the concept of “Russian idea” into the public use and comprehensively examines it in his journalistic and artistic works.