We can not overemphasize how the parallel is striking - and me it was totally unexpected - we have a right to establish between Dostoevsky and Rousseau. Primary reason for holding the extraordinary power sensitive and imaginative of these two prophetic geniuses who leads them, in their own way, to make a critical and uncompromising, and in many ways, visionary ideological principles which, in their time, were about to take their respective society to which they both appeared to be a transformation with unpredictable consequences and disastrous: the unlimited confidence in reason and the virtues immanent progress of science, the denial of the spiritual aspirations human being, a materialistic view of man and society, leading to a proposed radical reforms which the social and individual happiness would be measured only in terms of satisfying selfish interests, as the great principle of utility, etc.. Many things between them, of course, not least the profound religious convictions of Dostoevsky and all the terrible anxiety they eat at home (on the question of evil, for example) and which are not found in Rousseau, a fascination with the psychology of the black depths of the human soul which is without the author kind of Emile or La Nouvelle Heloise , not to mention differences in style are total of bouffonerie and violence, this nihilistic urban climate that does not naturally found in Rousseau - all this and many other things that take the different places, cultures and eras, each also own beliefs, conservatism in politics of one, his messianic belief in the virtues of Christianity and Russian peoples, which finds no echo in the author's social contract (with its notion of a purely civil religion), all of this, I said, these spirits up huge light years away from each other. But on one point at least, the belief that the deep moral and spiritual nature of man suffering the onslaught of relentless and destructive systematic project to build the new man rational, Dostoevsky and Rousseau agreed. And both saw the hearts of men a natural ability and spontaneous (unfortunately off by the corruption of society) to celebrate the goodness and beauty of life, to love innocently vulnerable beings, which is still in children, evangelical Christianity (non-dogmatic, non-theological) is the highest and most beautiful expression and who, would they follow the precepts, would make them much better and happier than all the expected benefits of improving their material conditions of existence and the triumph of atheism rational faith. These are the "values" and the sublime ideals embodied in Lev Myckhine The Idiot and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.
It is another giant of Russian littérarure fully shared similar beliefs, and this, of course, the major competitor of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy himself, whose "Rousseau" is a clear line that runs through all the work and life. On this point, a precise study should analyze what together and what distinguishes these three characters "good" that are Prince Myshkin in The Idiot , Levin Anna Karenina Bezukhov and Pierre in War and Peace which all three embody in their own way, this figure of social man naturally present in Rousseau's Emile . Do not forget that these two creators were men of great culture and they read French perfectly. In The Idiot Dostoevsky quotes openly The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas Fils and Madame Bovary Flaubert, and he greatly admired Les Miserables Victor Hugo, whose protagonist, Jean Valjean, is a figure of the good man who was deeply impressed.
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