Pro libertate: il pensiero politico di Fëdor Dostoevskij tra teoria del suolo e spirito di auto-perfezionamento

The present dissertation try to investigate Fyodor Dostoevsky's political thought. In order to achieve a research as exhaustive as possible, I have found preferable to consider every author’s «thought construction» (expressed in novels, articles, letters, notebooks, testimonies), capable of giving us back, as a whole, an overall reflection on the subject. Being the writer's thought devoid of that systematicity typical of the "professional" political theorist, it has been necessary a sewing work, hopefully capable of delivering continuity and speculative evolution in the framework of a narration that one has been preferred to order chronologically. Linking the author's thought to his time and his historical space, namely to show how his criticisms and his theoretical proposals have been a direct consequence of the nineteenth century's Russian history, has been, certainly, the first and most important stitching work. In the opening chapter the various fringes of a still unrelated, eclectic thought emerge entwined in the romantic tension between the finiteness of reality and the infinity of the idea. There are several elements that converge to feed the contrast, the alienation, the split (raskol) of this early youth stage; the dialectic does not reach synthesis, the "double" remains unresolved, and yet, precisely for this reason, two factors emerge that we will find throughout the continuation of Dostoevskian intellectual path: the rejection of a mere materialistic explanation of social problems; the choice of freedom. The second chapter focus on the dissemination of socialist ideas in Russia and the relationship that linked Dostoevsky to the Fourierist Circle Petrashevsky. The latter was the cause of the Siberian condemnation, analyzed in the third chapter. Finally, after passing through socialist curiosity, which nevertheless never succeeded in persuading him about the usefulness of the revolution (as well as deposed for the Commission of Inquiry), the writer discovered the Russian people and the ground (pochva). Thus began Dostoevsky’s defense work of Russian ideals and the need for a harmonious union between the estranged intellectual élite and the people (since February 1861) no longer servants. As shown in the fourth chapter, Dostoyevsky will express his most pungent criticism about European rationalism and social theory from his return to Petersburg, where using the magazines «Vremia» and «Epocha» will reveal all his refusal to those ideas that Occidentalist team, instead, wanted to import into the Russian Empire. Strengthened by the principles of the first Slavophilism, among which the free fraternal union of the peoples under the moral message of Christ, the author, as shown in the fifth chapter, will counteract the dangers of a human reason raised to new divinity, creator of the man-god, highlighting the poisons in the two works Prestulplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment) and Besy (The Possessed), as well as in that infinite archive of thoughts that was Dnevnik Pisatelia (Diary of a writer). Fundamental, in the path that is being introduced, the constant theme of freedom, and its proclamation in a period in which Russia entered in the revolutionary phase of its existence. In sharp contrast with revolting violence, for the rediscovery of Christian values preserved in Russian soil, for a community that arose on the fraternal spirit (certainly not achievable by decree) given by the sense of mutual duty, Dostoevsky's political poiesis can be summarize it in two words: pro libertate.