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How Did Fyodor Dostoevsky View Of Westernization

1046 Words5 Pages

Dostoevsky's Russia existed in a crossroads: increasing westernization to keep up with the rest of Europe or retraction inward to develop the slavic way without outside corruption. Starting with Peter the Great in the 17th century, Russian leaders looked to the west for advancement; however, a flurry of reforms and uprisings, specifically the Emancipation of the Serfs and the revolution in Poland, created doubt about the merits of westernization for many Russians. One such Russian had the name of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Many popular Russian writers during the 1860s called for greater reforms even after the Emancipation of the Serfs. Those writers included liberals, Nihilists, and Utilitarians advocating for conformity with a more advanced Western Europe and blamed Russian traditionalism with the degradation of Russian hegemony. …show more content…

He closely followed slavophiles who believed that Russian must find its own path towards modernization, rather than fall into chaos and revolution that comes from mirroring the west. Through his writing, Dostoevsky attempts to connect westernization with destruction, and traditional Russian beliefs, such as Orthodoxy, with peace. Fyodor Dostoevsky utilizes two distinct rates of temporal advancement- a rapidly advancing rate associated with crime and murder contrasting with seemingly eternal pauses associated with peace- to parallel the bipolar nature of a westernizing Russia with brisk Western time paralleling slow Orthodox time, elucidating that cultural shifts towards Western European modernization serve as the basis for crime among disillusioned Russians while maintaining traditional Russian culture correlates with peace and

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