From Kant to Dostoyevsky: Dmytro Čyževs’kyj’s Literary Anthropology

• Authors: Flack Patrick
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper reconstructs the core argument of Dmytro Čyževs’kyj’s unfinished project on formalism in ethics, developed in the late 1920s during his exile in Prague. Although the planned book never materialized, Čyževs’kyj published three articles and a broader set of related texts which, taken to gether, articulate a distinctive and coherent theoretical position. At its centre lies a compelling intuition: that literature plays a fundamental role in the constitution of moral subjectivity — what may be termed Čyževs’kyj’s literary anthropology. Čyževs’kyj begins with a critique of Kantian formalism, identifying its abstraction from the concrete will of the individual subject as the root of a broader crisis in ethical theory. Rather than abandoning formalism, however, he seeks to reconfigure it, proposing that ethical meaning is not logically subsumed but symbolically embodied. This claim is developed both philosophically — in a typology of the forms of generality — and interpretively, through readings of Dostoyevsky’s motif of the double. Positioned alongside contemporaries such as Bakhtin, Lukács, and Kojève, Čyževs’kyj offers a unique response: not polyphony, but ontological doubling as the site of ethical individuation.

Keywords

EN

Dmytro Čyževs’kyj; Mikhail Bakhtin; Fyodor Dostoevsky; philosophical anthropology; literary theory; Kant; formalist ethics; double; reception

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 46
• Pages: 86-103

Contributors

author

Flack Patrick