Literatura russa e desencantamento do mundo: estudos de Max Weber, Dostoiévski e Tolstói

Abstract

The present thesis seeks to uncover the points of contact of Weber's intellectual production, especially regarding to the concept of disenchantment of the world and the selected works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. All the method constructed to direct the relational analysis is based on the balance between text and context. The recognition of the ongoing debates in the Russian intellectual field, in permanent contact with the West, as well as the biographical and technical elements of the authors and their works constitute the paths of analysis. Weber became, at the same time, object of study and method. His own concepts were brought to the center of the analysis, making possible the interpretation and understanding of the individual behaviors of authors and literary characters, in order to extract their sociological meanings. In the first stage of the analysis, that relating to the disenchantment of the world by science and technique, The Death of Ivan Ilitch proved to be one of the strongest literary representations of the effects diagnosed by Weber on this process. The Dream of a ridiculous man proved to be the result of intense debate in Russia between Slavophiles and Westerners. Dostoevsky promotes, in the narrative, an invitation to Russia's resistance against the advance of Western science with its devastating process of disenchantment of the world. In the second moment of the analysis, the disenchantment of the world in its religious sense, while the loss of magification by the religion of the means of salvation, revealed that both the Karamazov Brothers and Resurrection demonstrate a Russian socio-historical basis radically different from that diagnosed by Weber in the West. On the western side, a rationalization of the exitence seeking for salvation, of an intramundane ascetic character that was pouring into the exclusivist and capitalist individualism that was eminently competitive. On the Russian side, a rationalization that did not follow the extreme western degrees and remained, therefore, in its mystical-contemplative or ascetic extramundane Christian bases, in any case fomenting a communist vision of universalist brotherly love that contrasts with the capitalist ethics. The conflicts of modernity and the effects of the disenchantment of the world, revealed in the productions of authors analyzed, have given the world the most striking diagnosis that we have heard of the course that humanity has taken, from modernity (by Weber), and from the possible paths to our history, to which Russia leaves thoughtprovoking clues under the pen of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.