Dostoevsky and Levinas

This article examines the philosophical and literary connections between the novelistic work of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Drawing on the study by Jacques Rolland, Alain Durel conducts a rigorous comparative analysis that highlights the way in which Dostoevskian novelistic polyphony prefigures and nourishes Levinasian philosophy of alterity. The central idea is that the Dostoevskian novel constitutes a narrative phenomenology of the ethical relation: the encounter with the Other, figured by the Poor and the Weak, tears the Self away from its closed identity and opens up the dimension of responsibility, originary guilt, and substitution. The contribution of the article is to show that this convergence is rooted in a common monotheistic tradition, Judeo-Christian, in which divine transcendence manifests itself only through the trace left in the interhuman relation.