Dostoevsky's Secular influences
Dostoevsky’s secular education was concerned with literature (especially French and German Romanticism, Russian moralism), satire, naturalism, and philosophy (especially German Idealism). Dostoevsky’s education did not center solely on Russian figures, though he was heavily inspired by the work of Nikolay Karamzin’s History of the Russian State as well as his letters of travel, which describes Europe’s trajectory toward modernity.
A further Russian inspiration can be found in the work of Alexander Pushkin, specifically The Queen of Spades and Songs of the Western Slavs. Pushkin’s work provided an immense influence upon Dostoyevsky throughout the entirety of his life. As Leonid Grossman is quoted within Frank’s biographical writing, “his greatest figures are linked to Pushkin’s heroes and often are manifestly deepenings of the original Pushkinian sketches that lift them to the level of tragic intensity” [1] .
Nikolai Gogol’s influence is brought to fore in the early 1940s. His work inspired the visionary, prosaic characters within Dostoevsky’s writing. As Joseph Frank states, a confluence of Pushkin and Gogol propel Dostoevsky away from Romanticism. A synthesis of the Gogolian sentiment and the prism of Pushkin produces a new form called “sentimental naturalism” a synthesis of the two masters and the burgeoning Dostoyevskian signature [2] . As articulated by Frank, the influence of Gogol can be seen within Dostoevsky’s characters who “tear deeply at the heart”.
Dostoevsky’s secular education centered on literature and language, as he acquired fluency in french, he was assigned readings such as Voltaire’s La Henriade. Literature was a common activity within the familial home, as his parents read Ann Radcliffe, which inspired terror within Dostoevsky (an interest which evolved into an infatuation with the sublime). Moreover, Dostoevsky’s father exposed Dostoevsky to Victor Hugo, Balzac and George Sand through a periodical titled The Library for Reading . A further french figure who inspired Dostoevsky’s literary awakening was Eugene Sue whose social criticism in 1944 as written by the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky , “wished to present to a depraved and egoistic society worshipping the golden calf the spectacle of the sufferings of wretched people..condemned by ignorance and poverty to vice and crime” [3] . Through an exploration of poetics, Dostoevsky is propelled by the work of Friedrich Schiller, as he writes in Diary of a Writer [4] , Schiller’s work has... “soaked into the russian soul”.
From the philosophical milieu, Dostoevsky gravitated toward German Idealist philosophy. The philosophical works of Immanuel Kant (specifically The Critique of Pure Reason, 1787) inspired Dostoevsky’s views on moral consciousness, as Joseph Frank notes, “ moral consciousness is an ineradicable part of human nature and that immorality is a necessary condition of any world order” (Frank, pg. 76). The simultaneity of good/evil that exists and the potentialities of reconciling this contradiction is found within Dostoevsky’s work. Furthermore, Friedrich Schelling’s idea of art as an “organ of metaphysical cognition” as the site of transcendental experience for human beings. The belief in the metaphysical power of art was defended by Dostoyevsky beyond the 1840s [5]