Das absolute Wissen and the Dostoevskian Sobornost’. Reception and intercultural transformation between Hegel and Dostoevsky

Abstract

This paper explores the intercultural encounter between Hegel’s concept of absolutes Wissen (absolute knowledge) and Dostoevsky’s reworking of the Orthodox notion of sobornost’. In nineteenth-century Russia, Hegelian philosophy represented both a powerful intellectual catalyst and a contested cultural paradigm, provoking divergent responses among Westernizers, revolutionaries, and Slavophiles. While Herzen, Belinsky, and Bakunin used Hegelian dialectics to justify progress or revolution, the Slavophiles opposed it but nonetheless engaged with it as a counter-model for reaffirming Orthodox tradition and communal life. Dostoevsky, situated within this philosophical and cultural milieu, absorbed and transformed Hegelian categories into his literary and existential vision. By confronting Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge with the Orthodox concept of sobornost’, Dostoevsky reshapes the dialectic into a narrative of freedom, tragedy, and communal responsibility. The analysis highlights how sobornost’ emerges in The Brothers Karamazov not as an abstract utopia, but as a lived, fragile, and open-ended possibility grounded in love, forgiveness, and education. This comparative framework shows how philosophy and literature converge in addressing the tension between individual and community, universality and particularity, reason and faith. Ultimately, the dialogue between Hegel and Dostoevsky illustrates how intercultural reception generates creative reinterpretations that transcend national and disciplinary boundaries.