DOSTOEVSKY AND NIETZSCHE ON THE OVERCOMING OF NIHILISM

The article aims to analyze the influence of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism on the Russian culture and to consider its contexts in Dostoevsky's fiction and social and political essays. The study proceeds from the statement of difference between the construal of nihilism in European philosophical tradition that has culminated in Nietzsche's works and its meaning in Russian culture. For Nietzsche, the term "nihilism" meant the objective, albeit terrible and threatening result of the historical development of European culture. Russian nihilism boiled down to the subjective stance of indiscriminate negation that was based on the whimsical combination of ideas borrowed from European atheism, materialism, positivism, and utilitarianism. However, both in Europe and Russia of that time, nihilism disclosed the values and even absolutes as immanent and thus constructed entities. It should be also observed that in Europe the overcoming of nihilism confined itself to the search or construction of the immanent substitutes for the overthrown values and absolutes, while Russian culture in many respects still remained traditional. From this perspective, the vicissitudes of confrontation between modernity and tradition as it was perceived by individuals in the face of the coming nihilism turn out to be the implicit background of Dostoevsky's writings. Whereas Nietzsche's approach to the problem of overcoming nihilism was based on his concept of superman as a peculiar point of view or a peculiar, singled out perspective and was associated with the idea of the "eternal return", Dostoevsky, in tune with the principles of Russian philosophy, relied on the retention of the elements of tradition as an antidote against the nihilistic tendencies of modernity. Such a stance implies the revision of the metaphysics of modernity as a certain pattern of relations between part and whole. It also implies a different approach to the resolution of contradictions and therefore a distinct construal of identity and difference as it was demonstrated in Dostoevsky's speech on Pushkin that introduced the famous idea of the "universal responsiveness". No matter whether Dostoevsky's stance is utopian or not, he still not only argued that he belonged to the tradition of Russian philosophy with its ideas of all-unity and Sophianic unity, but also became one of those who in a way anticipated modern controversies on metaphysics, identity, and difference.