Book Projects

I offer a comprehensive view of how truth appears in Dostoevsky’s novels. To do so, I explore the notions of confessions, evil, and beauty. The first part of the book focuses on confession. First, I analyze the two approaches in hunting for Raskolnikov’s confession in Crime and Punishment. The detective Porfiry and Sonya push Raskolnikov to confess. The former, in order to condemn him. The latter, in order to save him. Second, I discuss the revelation of a human heart divided between good and evil, as it appears in the three confessions between Dmitry and Alyosha in The Karamazov Brothers. The presence of good and evil in the same heart is a theme that appears in Russian philosophical thought. Third, during Dmitry’s interrogation, one final idea appears in confession: when I reveal the ultimate depths of my soul, I realize that I am primarily responsible for the world.

In the second part of the book, I analyze truth by looking at the problem of evil and the notion of beauty. In the discussion of the problem of evil, I apply Constantin Noica’s view about unilateral contradiction. Philosopher Constantin Noica writes about the unilateral contradiction in this manner: “Only evil contradicts good, but not the other way around.” Becoming contradicts being; being, however, can assume becoming instead of opposing it. In a similar fashion, evil contradicts the good; the good, however, assumes evil and transcends it.

The book ends with a discussion of truth and beauty. In this chapter, I emphasize that Dostoevsky’s notion of Beauty does not belong to an aesthetic category, but to his metaphysics. Beauty is an intrinsic feature of the matrix of the world, which provides a call to whom people are to answer. Just as in the previous situations, where there are two understandings of confession and two understandings of responsibility, Dostoevsky shows that beauty has a similar path: people can define beauty according to their individual interests and impose it on others. Still, people can recognize that beauty is transcendental, it belongs to truth, and, although its knowledge remains personal, it is not in our power to alter it.