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Einstein and Dostoevski

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Boris Kuznetsov
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Extract

Why did Einstein say of Dostoevski: “He gives me more than any other thinker, more even than Gauss?” What could Dostoevski give to the originator of the theory of relativity?

It is certain that it is not a question of the philosophical, moral or social ideas with which he filled the thoughts and utterances of his heroes. Einstein drew from artistic literature the driving force for his research and not the elements of a scientific concept of the world. The influence of artistic creation on scientific creation was the result not of any positive answers but of the common aesthetic ground in the problems and contradictions of the earlier representation of the world and in the intensity of the artistic conception of the infinite contradictions and complexities of the origin of the world.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 14 , Issue 53 , March 1966 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 See "Problems of the Poetry of Dostoevski," by Bakhtin in The Soviet Writers series, Moscov 1963.

2 Dostoevski, Collected works in ten volumes. "GOSSLITIZDAT," (GOSSu darstvennoïe LITeraturnoïe IZDATelstvo = State Publishing House for Lite rature), Moscow, 1956-1958, vol. IX, p. 92.

3 Ibid., p. 105.

4 Dostoevski, Collected works in ten volumes. "GOSSLITIZDAT," Moscow, 1956-1958, vol. V, p. 438.

5 Tamm, "Einstein and Contemporary Physics," Successes in the Physical Sciences, vol. 59, 1956, p. 8.

6 Dostoevski, Collected works in ten volumes. "GOSSLITIZDAT," Moscow, 1956-1958. vol. IX, p. 295.

7 Ibidem, p. 296.

8 See I. Ehrenburg, "Two Portraits," Youth, 1965, No. 1, p. 69.

9 See Carl Seelig, Albert Einstein, Leben und Werk eines Genius unserer Zeit (Life and Work of a Genius of Our Time), Zurich, 1960, p. 265.