‘Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears’ is a short text written in 2003 by Lázló Földényi, a Hungarian cultural critic and professor of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Budapest.1 I discovered this little masterpiece in a bookshop in Paris, quite a long time ago, in 2008, when it came out in French with Actes Sud.

This text opens a multiplicity of interpretations. The one I choose to follow here is Földényi's profound meditation on the relationship between philosophy and literature. In an article published in the New Yorker in May 2020, James Wood asks of Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears: ‘Who could resist the title?’ The title is for sure irresistible. It is so, I think, because it is at once and indistinctly philosophical and literary. It announces a narrative and sounds like the title of a novel or short story. At the same time, Hegel's readers immediately understand what is philosophically at stake in it: Hegel's supposed indifference to suffering, Hegel's indifference to Siberia, Hegel's indifference to exile, Hegel's indifference to literature. Or, more exactly, to what literature has to say that definitely escapes the realm of the concept, that is also of world history.

I will examine three aspects of this literary-philosophical intertwining.

I

First intertwining: the intermingling of fiction and reality. The fiction is that of Dostoyevsky reading Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History in his Siberian exile. This fiction is undoubtedly based on factual truths, though. What are they? It is important to resituate the context. Before he was sent to Siberia, Dostoyevsky had participated in a radical intellectual discussion group called the Petrashevsky Circle. The group was suspected of subversive activities, which led to Dostoyevsky's arrest in 1849 and his sentencing to death.

On 22 December 1849, Dostoyevsky was led before the firing squad but received a last-minute reprieve and was sent to a Siberian labour camp in Omsk, where he worked for four years. On his release, in the spring of 1854, he was sent to Semipalatinsk, in southern Siberia, where he began several years of military service. A military service that was in fact an exile, a consignment to a place unnoticed and forgotten, a desert far from ‘European’ Russia.