“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”: Personality as the Instrument of Transfiguration of the World

Abstract

The article is an attempt of slow reading of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” in the context of A Writer’s Diary. “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” is here examined as one of Dostoevsky's ‘art manifesto’, where the writer synthetically formulates the philosophical foundations and thoughts that shape the depths of the surrounding journalistic texts of A Writer’s Diary. The author cannot speak directly, immediately, and discursively about these foundations, because if so they would be accused for certain of being “fantastical” and would not be accepted; moreover, they would be absolutely and ultimately rejected and mocked by readers, whose existence is organized on different basis, within the limits of the “proximate and visible in its flowing immediacy”, and that have different ideas about the structure of their own personality and of humanity. Dostoevsky strives not only to show the true configurations, the true interconnections between the single person and mankind, but also to give his reader, in the capsule of an artistic form, some working methods of cooperation with the whole by means of self-change.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• “the dream of a ridiculous man” in the context of a writer’s diary
• a writer’s diary as a whole
• philosophy of personality and sameness
• transformation of the whole by means of self-change