Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Masonic Environment

Abstract

For the first time are here presented to Dostoevsky scholars new facts concerning the masonic environment of the writer, who starting from his education in Chermak’s boarding school in 1834-1837 cultivated close relations of friendship with masons, some of them initiated even in 1840s (Apollon Grigorev), when masonry in Russia was officially forbidden, but nevertheless underground meetings continued. Reasons are given in support to the hypothesis, expressed for the first time by Tatiana Kasatkina in the middle of 1990s, of the possibility for Dostoevsky to have been a mason during the 1840s. Whether or not, direct references to masons and masonic symbolic in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre are impossible to explain (Uncle’s Dream, The Humiliated and the Insulted, The Adolescent, The Brothers Karamazov) if one ignores his interest for masonic teaching.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• apollon grigorev
• chermak’s boarding school
• masonry
• masons
• biography
• aleksey pleshcheev
• petrashevsky circle