RODRIGO MORTARA ALMEIDA

In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin describes the Dostoevskian heroes as ideological, possessed by an idea. Here, ideas do not appear as something external available to the characters but are integrated into their lives, constituting an integral position toward the world and others—these ideas are the fixed ideas. They constitute a rich subject for philosophical research when considering three aspects related to their origin: 1) that they are not simply created by the author but are also reflected in the Russian intellectual life of the second half of the 19th century; 2) that the type of relationship between the idea and the character also has a real origin, the intellectual raznotchíniets (a possible translation might be "rootless") of the new Russian intelligentsia; 3) that due to the two aspects already mentioned, fixed ideas artistically represent a specific ideological configuration of Russia at the time. In our master’s thesis, we aim to study and describe these fixed ideas through the novel A raw youth (1875), trying to understand how they relate to the particular position of the intellectual in Russia during the 1860s-1870s.