The search for identity in Egon Bondy's novella The Brothers Ramazov (Dostoyevsky redressed by a Czech underground author)
Abstract
One hundred years after publication of the novel The Brothers Karamazov a Czech atheist philosopher Egon Bondy enters in his novella The Brothers Ramazov into intercultural dialogue with the Russian God searching author F. M.
Dostoyevsky. The novella unfolds in keeping with compositional structure laid out by the Russian author but is set into Czechoslovakia of 1980's, the peak years of the so-called normalisation when one socio-cultural experiment, Real socialism, of mankind was collapsing.
The protagonist is an autobiographical figure of Ivan Ramaz who comments upon the fate of Czechs as well as upon the destiny of the humankind. In polemical dialogues with his brothers and his inner voice, a devil, he confronts Dostoyevsky and analyses contemporary state of human knowledge and moral values.
He points out the emptying of meaning of such notions as God's existence, freedom, responsibility, humility, conscience, guilt and punishment, cooperation. He concludes that contemporary European society is on track to nowhere because of anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism.
Consumerism makes man to trade moral values for material welfare, any unifying transcendent idea becomes an illusion. The meaning of human existence is not in reaching its goal but in incessant search and questioning.