UC Santa Barbara

Shakespearean Fools in Dostoevsky: Toward an Ethics of Love, examines the connection between Shakespeare’s tragic fools and Dostoevsky’s “predatory” (khishchniki) and holy fools (iurodivye). It charts how the transition from clown to wise fool in Dostoevsky’s novels is mediated by his reception of the metamorphosis the figure of the fool undergoes in Shakespeare’s work. In this transition, the “superfluous” fool (Russian intellectuals uprooted from the country in the 1840s) transforms into the “demonic” fool (ruthless Westernized revolutionaries of the 1860s) and finally into the holy fool, which this project argues is Dostoevsky’s ultimate, ethical response to these earlier types. The dissertation begins by comparing the Western and Eastern fool and proceeds thematically, structurally, and literary-historically. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky both employ a familiar figure to identify and filter moral-ethical issues, and by putting these fools and their functions in dialogue, it seeks an understanding of the fools’ aesthetic-ethical purpose beyond their immediate historical and literary contexts. This comparative study of Shakespeare’s and Dostoevsky’s fools contends that a focus on Dostoevsky’s ethics of active love (deatel'naia liubov’) and love as suffering (umilenie) provides a window into Shakespeare’s fools’ care as performance. Dialectically addressing the evolution of the similarities and contradictions that arise in and between these authors’ fools, a new scholarly avenue emerges from a transcultural understanding of Dostoevsky’s and Shakespeare’s developing ethics as an ethics of love opposed to rational egoism, a popular philosophical position in Russian nineteenth-century intellectual circles and a nascent perspective in Shakespeare.