Ap. Grigoriev’s Struggle against Dogmatism in Church and Public Life and Ivan Karamazov’s Poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor’

Abstract

The article suggests that the plot and ideology of the “Poem about the Grand Inquisitor” (“The Brothers Karamazov” by F. M. Dostoevsky) contain reminiscences from the article by Ap. A. Grigorieva “Opposition of stagnation. Features from the history of obscurantism ”(1861), which was the answer of the journal of the Dostoevsky brothers to the persecution by conservative secular and church circles of Archimandrite Theodore (in the world of A. M. Bukharev), who called on Russian society to abandon the Pharisees and pagan elements in the profession of Christianity, to return to Apostolic Orthodoxy. A. M. Bukharev understood the latter as a free path of a person to God, not constrained by dogmas and authorities, carried out in the absence of administrative supervision over the spiritual life of believers. A number of questions posed in this article by Ap. A. Grigoriev, in particular, the problem of “the church for atheists” (people who are not able to assimilate the idea of the New Testament), the question of the unconditionalness of church “dogmas”, the meaning of church and secular “authority”, the compatibility of Christ’s teachings with attempts to create good with the help of violence, which found detailed coverage in the books of A. M. Bukharev, are found at the level of reminiscence in Ivan Karamazov’s “poem” “The Grand Inquisitor”. The article contains an analytical consideration of the creative relationship between Ap. A. Grigoriev, A. M. Bukharev and F. M. Dostoevsky with the connection of N. V. Gogol’s book “Selected passages from correspondence with friends”, which made the strongest impression on them, as well as historical and cultural commentary on the content and results of the creative contacts of these writers and thinkers.