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Moral Ambiguity in Dostoevski
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
In a recent review of Wasiolek’s work on Dostoevski’s major writings Joseph Frank criticized the idea of moral ambiguity as “unquestionably the most dubious“ in the book. Although he regards the idea as useful and relevant, Frank feels that Wasiolek makes the “ambiguity more radical than it really is.” What is this concept and how radical is it in Dostoevski’s work?
The notion is a more subtle and far-reaching version of the common view that things are not necessarily what they seem to be. It says that situations and actions are in themselves neutral and meaningless; any value or meaning is imposed by us. Expressed thus, moral ambiguity seems a rarefied concept, but in Dostoevski’s hands it becomes a vivid, if still confusing, reality. It is best illustrated at first by specific and limited incidents.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1968
References
1 Joseph Frank, review of Wasiolek, Edward, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, Mass. [1964])Google Scholar, Slavic Review, XXVI, No. 2 (June 1967), 342.
2 Frank, p. 341.
3 Wasiolek, p. 152.
4 Ibid., p. 55.
5 Frank, p. 342.
6 E. H. Carr, Dostoevsky (London, 1931), p. 809.
7 K. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky (Paris, 1947).
8 Wasiolek, p. 69.
9 Dostoevski could scarcely be described as a logical positivist; yet his view is very close to that of Wittgenstein: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists— and if it did, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental” ( Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [London, 1961], 6.41, p. 145 Google Scholar).