Dostoyevsky‘s conception of guilt: Levinas’ philosophical interpretation

Dostoyevsky’s novels are interpreted from various perspectives. The author of this article tries to reveal the peculiarity of Emmanuel Levinas’ interpretation. Emmanuel Levinas is, of course, the French philosopher who learned from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and was much interpreted by Jacques Derrida. He received the premises of his philosophy of dialogue from the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rozenzweig. On the other hand, the presupposition of this article relies on the following hypothesis: that is not possible to understand his main concept of disinterestedness (désintéressement) from the perspective of the traditions of Western philosophy. The main thesis of the article states: in his reflection upon the philosophical interpretation of guilt, Levinas relied not only on Jewish Scriptures, but also on the sources he found in Dostoyevsky’s novels where the Russian writer was searching for his own understanding of New Testament morality. For the arguments the author of the article compares Levinas’ texts with the main ideas of Dostoyevsky expressed in the novels Notes from the Dead House, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and The IdiotVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŠvietimo akademij