“Restoring the Kinship”: The Novel The Adolescent as a Prologue to the Dialogue Between Nikolay Fedorov and Fyodor Dostoevsky

Information about the author:

Anastasia G. Gacheva, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5453-0881

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Acknowledgments:

The reported study was carried out at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS and funded by the Russian Sciences Foundation (RSF), project no. 17-18-01432-П.

Abstract:

The article tries to read the novel The Adolescent in the light of the spiritual and creative dialogue between the philosopher of the common task Nikolay Fedorov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although The Adolescent was written and published three years before Fedorov’s student N. Peterson presented his teacher’s ideas to the writer in the article “What should a people’s school be?”, the novel can be considered as a prologue to the topic that became later the subject of Fedorov’s main work The question of brotherhood or kinship, about the causes of the non-fraternal, unrelated, i.e. non-peaceful, state of the world, and about the means to restore kinship. The plot of the novel is interpreted in the article through the prism of Fedorov’s themes of non-kinship and the restoration of universal kinship, the idea of returning the hearts of sons to their fathers and fathers’ hearts to their children. It is shown how the theme of “family as the practical beginning of love” is expressed in the novel.