“...Was passing in blessing, the pope antichrist”. About one paradoxical wording in the preparatory materials for F.M. Dostoevsky's novel “The possesed”

The article analyses an extract from the preparatory notes for F.M. Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Possessed” which was published in the complete edition of the writer’s collected works in Leningrad in 1974. This extract is in contradiction with all that F.M. Dostoyevsky used to write about the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the dogma of Infallibility of the Pope introduced at the First Vatican Council (also known as the XX Oecumenical Council) which was summoned by the Pope Pius IX. The dogma was declared on the 18th of July 1870, was made public and discussed all over Europe as well as in Russia. This new version of Dostoyevsky’s interpretation suggested in this particular article was proved by the context of the writer’s notebook. Some additional arguments can be found in the history of writing the novel “The Possessed” and in the notes on the Roman Catholic dogma and the Russian Schism. They can be traced in “Notes from the Underground”, in the novels “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov”, and in “A Writer’s Diary”. The author proposes the following idea: the analyzed phrase allows us to say that in the first edition of the novel “The Possessed” the Prince’s character and ideology is that of an apologist for Pochvennichestvo. He advocates the Russian religious reformation based on the canonical conventions of the Old Belief, and the Prince is a prototype of Alyosha Karamazov “the doer”, who, in his turn, puts this idea into practice in the epilogue of “The Brothers Karamazov” where the so-called “Russian boys” and Alyosha are united by brotherly love and self-sacrifice, i.e. the fundamental concepts of Dostoyevsky’s ideology.