Wunderglaube als literarisches und imperiales Problem Leskov, Dostoevskij und die „geistliche Macht“

This essay reexamines the quarrel that Fedor Dostoevskij and Nikolaj Leskov fought in 1873 in the journals Graždanin (The Citizen) and Russkij mir (The Russian World) after Leskov published his story Zapečatlennyj angel (The Sealed Angel). This reading foregrounds the concept of “spiritual power” (duxovnaja vlastʹ), used by Dostoevskij and largely ignored in previous research. Left undefined, Dostoevskij’s use of the concept implies that an essential feature of this power is the ability to resist worldly power. He argues that Leskov portrays spiritual power as “powerless” because in his representation of the official Church the bishop does not object to a bureaucrat’s reckless sealing of an Old Believer icon in Kyiv. Moreover, by having the Old Believers’ community recognize a made-up, “natural” miracle ; the unsealing of a copy of their icon ; as a sufficient reason for reconversion to the official Church, Leskov, in Dostoevskij’s view, exposes his readers in an unresponsible way to the modern problem of plausibility and eventually to positivism and skepticism. According to Dostoevskij, both of these moves constitute a potential“offense of the people’s feelings” (narodnoe čuvstvo) and “terrible violence.” In this way, he involves Leskov in an argument about populism, which then overlays the imperial dimension of the schismatics’ return to the official Church. As this essay aims to show, the result is an oscillation between both authors’ aim to reintegrate the empire through religion, i.e., the right use of “spiritual power,” on the one hand and a populist justification of art, on the other. The shrill polemic between the two writers shows in a nutshell how the analysis of the ‘imperiality’ of late nineteenth-century Russian literature has to reckon not only with colonialism and nationalism but also with an intertwined set of problems, which are religion, populism, and the aesthetic question of realistic representation.

Keywords: Fedor Dostoevskij; Nikolaj Leskov; Russian realism; Russian Empire; religion; populism; positivism