The Image of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Personality and Work in the Essays of the German Writer Paul Ernst (1866-1933)

Abstract

The article analyzes essays and reviews written in 1890s – 1920s by the German writer P. Ernst devoted to the personality and work of F.M. Dostoevsky. Ernst’s publications show that the German writer was quite familiar with Russian literature in general and, in particular, with the work of Dostoevsky. The peculiarities of the German writer’s reception of Dostoevsky’s worldview, religious, and aesthetic views and their reflection in different works of the Russian writer (The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Poor Folk etc.) are considered in the context of the European literary process at the turn of the 19-20th centuries (the confrontation between traditional and modernist trends in art). The article can serve as a kind of refutation of the point of view presented in the famous review of V. V. Dudkin and K. M. Azadovsky “Dostoevsky in Germany (1846-1921)”, 1973 (Section VI. Dostoevsky in the social-democratic and workers’ press). The authors (entirely according to the views about P. Ernst in the USSR), negatively assess the worldview of the German writer and therefore a bit simplistically interpret Ernst’s perception of Dostoevsky's work.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• ernst
• german literature
• reception
• modernism
• neoclassicism
• imagology