The Validation of the Writer’s Prophetic Status in the Russian Literary Tradition: From Pushkin and Iazykov through Gogol to Dostoevsky

Although it is widely recognized that the image of the writer as a prophetic figure has played an unusually prominent and persistent role in the development of the Russian literary tradition, this intriguing phenomenon has not received the close critical attention that it deserves. West European literary tradition provides a well-established context for the image, stretching from Homer and Virgil through Dante to Chenier, Blake, Byron, Hugo, Mickiewicz, and Nietzsche, to cite just some of the most obvious authors associated with prophecy. This broad framework clearly had an important influence on the Russian adoption of the image of the writer as prophet. Yet Russian writers took up this image in a substantially different and unique way. What was the reason for this difference? Among several possible answers to this question, one stands out as most significant: following the failure of the Decembrist uprising, the Russian image of the writer as prophet underwent a fundamental transformation from an aesthetic, literary category (modeled on the classical and European tradition) into a spiritual and historical category (modeled on the biblical tradition). As a result of this shift, embracing the prophetic image came to be associated with espousing the “Russian idea” in one form or another. By and large, most Russian writers who took up an openly