Aspects of fate and freedom in Dostoevsky's works

This dissertation is an attempt to describe the full spectrum of ideas of fate encountered in Dostoevsky's artistic universe and to incorporate disparate concepts into a single system of notions of fate perceived as a dynamic and evolving entity.;In Chapter 1 Dostoevsky's own Romantic notion of fate is analyzed. Through references to the Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Human Freedom by F. J. W. von Schelling and to the Book of Job striving for deification is established as the mainspring behind human actions and the exercise of one's free will as the principal means to achieve the desired goal of becoming a deity.;Chapter 2 is a socio-anthropological study of the notion of fate beginning with its emergence and through its development and evolution.;Chapter 3 is devoted to the examination of The Notes from the House of the Dead as the writer's venture into the world of Russian peasant, non-elite fatalism. It will be shown that Dostoevsky saw the abyss that separated “narod” from the nobility not only as the social gap, but as a profound difference in their overall worldviews.;Chapter 4 analyzes The Gambler and The Brothers Karamazov as two cases of transition from one kind of fatalism to another. In The Gambler, the movement is a downward one: from a being in charge of his destiny Aleksej Ivanovich gradually turns into a creature driven by sheer chance.;A comparative analysis of The Brothers Karamazov and The Hero of Our Time, and the reading of The Brothers Karamazov as a Christianized fairy tale, center on Mitya as the protagonist of the novel and explore his upward journey to the world of destiny, responsibility and free choice.;In Chapter 5, several refutations of Ivan's ideas in The Brothers Karamazov are analyzed, and the chapter concludes with the notion of imitatio Christi not through sacrilegious deification but through acceptance of universal guilt and suffering as the way to salvation in Dostoevsky's artistic universe.