About Tatiana Kasatkina, From-Subject-To-Subject Method, and “Realism in the Highest Sense”

Abstract

The article, dedicated to the anniversary of the prominent Russian literary scholar, philologist, philosopher, and educator, Tatiana A. Kasatkina, represents an overview on the sidelines of her theoretical and historical-literary works. Since the 1990s, Tatiana Kasatkina has engaged in a dispute with “positivism” in philology, defending the rights of literary scholars to religious thinking and demonstrating its significance for the humanities. The controversy over “religious philology” sparked by her book was resolved in practice: Tatiana Kasatkina’s creative work, dedicated to the status of words in Dostoevsky’s artistic world, the structure of the image, the author’s position, problems of reading, and perceiving his works, demonstrated the productivity of her "from-subject-to-subject" method of research and understanding of the text. Tatiana Kasatkina showed that Dostoevsky’s artistic method, which he defined as “realism in the highest sense,” is based on a religious worldview and implies the inseparability of the image and the Archetype.

Keywords

• tatiana kasatkina’s philological work
• positivism in philology
• religious philology
• from-subject-to-subject method
• fedor dostoevsky’s work
• “realism in the highest sense
• ” theory and practice of reading