Symbolist Critics and the Death of the Author, 1905–1910

This chapter contextualizes the twenty-fifth anniversary of Fyodor Dostoevsky's death as a turning point in the writer's cultural and critical reception. The 1905 Russian Revolution had intensified the ongoing conflict between Dostoevsky's religious views and his political affiliations. Whether they renounced him or clung tighter to his image, different generations of the Symbolist school—including Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Andrei Belyi, and Viacheslav Ivanov—attempted to take Dostoevsky into an uncertain future at a time when his ideas were breaking away from the biographical persona that for some had previously anchored them. Their embrace of text over author was not the Formalist rejection of biography as a mode of analysis; it arose instead from the demands of their own radical ideologies, personal religious convictions, spiritual eclecticism, and creative activity. Looking in particular at the radical shift in Merezhkovsky's reading of Dostoevsky's cultural value and the unrecognized centrality of Dostoevsky to Ivanov's collaboration with the controversial “mystical anarchist” movement, the chapter is about the beginning of the end of Dostoevsky as author and the inception of his autonomous textual existence. Along the way the text emerges as a transmuted object capable of stimulating new faith in their version of Dostoevsky.