Exploration Of Man's Predicament And Way Out - The Basic Theme Of Dostoevsky's Works

Dostoevsky was a peak of Russian literature in the 19 th century.His in-depth description of the human soul has always been praised by critics and readers.At the beginning of his creative career,the famous critic Belinsky called him "another Gogol" and believed that he could inherit the Russian naturalist literary tradition.However,his subsequent creations did not continue to explore for too long on the road of "reflecting reality" in traditional realistic literature.Instead,he plunged headlong into the exploration of the mystery of the human heart,and paid great attention to man and man's destiny.It can be said that the two themes firmly occupied the core of all his works,and influenced the presentation form of his works from the inside out.In his creation,Dostoevsky discovered a distinctive feature of human beingsduality,that is,the opposition and entanglement of divinity and humanity,of soul and flesh,which caused the dilemma that people encountered on the philosophical level.Thanks to his unique experience,he keenly captured the possible dilemma of this characteristic in the sociohistorical level,and presented it in his own works: On the one hand,when approaching divinity,people might expand their self-will due to abuse of the freedom granted by divinity.This self-expansion may ultimately leads to selfdestruction;on the other hand,people will make various irrational behaviors against rules in order to prove the existence of freedom,resulting in punishment from the rules.In the mid-late 19 th century,Russia was facing an era of great changes.Many writers started thinking and exploring around how to get out of the sociohistorical dilemma and find a reasonable path of development.The representative thoughts were Chernyshevsky's Reasonable egoism and Nihilism.They tried to restrain human's strong self-will with reason.But in Dostoyevsky's view,this attempt was bound to fail.He artistically presented the reasons for the failure by creating a series of radical characters.In addition,in the chapter " The Grand Inquisitor" of the "Brothers Karamazov",Dostoyevsky proved that any attempt to achieve happiness by controlling human freedom will eventually lead to a greater dilemma in which people are just kept in captivity like livestock,and thinking they have achieved real happiness.Based on this,Dostoyevsky launched an exploration of how people can get out of the predicament from different angles.Faced with the divinity and humanity in everyone,as well as the possibility of corruption in the latter,Dostoevsky advocated awakening the divinity and the goodwill,so as to gradually get rid of the temptation and defilement of human nature.While facing the human's dilemma at the sociohistorical level,Dostoyevsky proposed the Native soil conservatism,calling on intellectuals to return to the "foundation"-that is,the people.And through the establishment of group models,memory inheritance,and aggregative collectives,the current society is improved,and the "aggregative" villages of traditional Russian society are expanded to the level of human civilization,thereby creating a utopia.There is no doubt that Dostoevsky's exploration is highly idealized.However,with the prevalence of material desires,the contradictions between people have become unprecedentedly sharp.The spiritual realm shown by trends of thought similar to the Native soil conservatism is still worth pursuing and yearning for,and still has its practical significance.