Bourgeois rationality and Christian reasonableness: an exploration of Dystopia in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as works of realist fiction portraying the dystopic conditions of life in nineteenth century Europe while functioning as an authorial call to the practice of Christian reasonableness against the menacing growth of bourgeois rationalization marking the era of the Industrial Revolution, capitalist banking, and widespread alienation that resulted in a growing sense of unresolved historical time. Drawing on the utopian theories of Ernst Bloch and Frederic Jameson, I read Dostoevsky's works as a criticism of bourgeois rationalism and an argument for reasonableness towards the resolution of the individual's existential experience with the collective experience of historical time