Authors

Philipp Kohl¹;  ¹ LMU Munich, Germany

Discussion

In the early 1870s, theorists of social progress become concerned with a thermodynamic prognosis: according to the law of energy dissipation established by William Thomson, the planet will eventually cool to death in a distant future. Before what Herbert Spencer terms “universal death” (a state of temperature equilibrium later called the “heat-death”) arrives, the planet will not be habitable anymore. Sociologists like Sergei Yuzhakov, usually concerned with agrarian questions of the near future, try to include the new irreversible timeline of planetary decay in their theories. In 1873, Nikolai Mikhailovsky publishes the essay The Ideals of Mankind and the Natural Course of Things (Idealy chelovechestva i estestvennyi chod veshchei) about the “last chapter of the Earth’s novel” and humankind’s possible ideals in the face of its remote extinction. Since in the same issue of Otechestvennye zapiski, Mikhailovsky engages in fierce criticism of Dostoevsky’s Demons, the writer is likely to be familiar with his arguments. In The Adolescent, ideas of planetary finality, visions of distant extinction and ethical questions resulting from them are present in multiple ways. As Liza Knapp has shown, the repeating vision of “ice rocks” has been influenced by French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion. While Dostoevsky may not be familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, planetary and cosmic timescales appear in many of his works. After a discussion of planetary finality and its relationship with more immediate ecological threats such as deforestation, the paper will look for poetological transmutations of these ideas in The Brothers Karamazov, especially in Ivan Karamazov’s nightmare dialogue with the devil, where a cyclical devastation and regeneration of the planet is envisioned. While planetary and geological timescales will be the focus of the contribution, their interconnections with other temporalities of natural matter will be discussed in both novels. The paper will thus demonstrate how ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies allow for new perspectives on Dostoevsky’s work.