William Blake and F. M. Dostoevsky: a History of Comparison

The article is devoted to the history of comparing the works of WilliamBlake and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The author starts with the lectures of Andre Gide inthe 1920s, in which he used quotes from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell to clarifyDostoevsky. Gide believed that both authors were united by the devil theme and thefascination with evil and started the tradition of comparing Blake with Dostoevskyand Nietzsche, reflected in the works of Jean Wahl and Georges Bataille. Americanscholar Melvin Rader united Blake and Dostoevsky in rethinking the structure of theChristian Trinity and the image of the demiurge. Colin Wilson also compared Blake,Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche in their attitude to Christianity, confirming the tradition ofattributing Blake to the literature of modernism. Czesław Miłosz in the 1970s unitesBlake and Dostoevsky as visionaries at the end of the Christian stage of history: bothof them passionately note the terrifying fall of mankind into the abyss of the materialworld and the inability to survive there in its former guise. The Swedish-Englishresearcher D. Gustafsson in his articles of the 2010s defended the idea of an innerunity between the writings of Blake and Dostoevsky: the fiery Orc of Blake has thesame nature as the young revolutionaries of Dostoevsky, and goes the same way fromrebel to tyrant. In the opera of Alexander Belousov in Stanislavsky Electrotheatre inMoscow, “The Book of Seraphim” (2020), Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin and Blake's Thelare combined. The director interprets the desire of Thel and Stavrogin to get out ofinnocence into experience, and the dance of Stavrogin with Thel-Matryosha is not anact of violence, but an act of young passion. Thus, the English romanticist Blake andthe Russian realist Dostoevsky have a serious and interesting history of comparison.