The authoritarian personality in Dostoyevsky's Os demônios

Abstract

This article aims to analyze, based on the novel The Possessed, how the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky has understood and pictured the “phenomenon” named by critical theory as authoritarian personality. To this aim we will face passages from Dostoyevsky’s novel against some ideas developed by the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, mainly from the text “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”. Thus, we will also pay attention to the Freudian concept of crowd psychology, though always through Adorno and Horkheimer’s bias. Finally, the text indicates the modernity not only of the novel’s thematic, but also of the polyphonic structure of the work itself which, for its dialogical feature, sounds like resistance to the authoritarianism that hovers inclusively over the enlightened humanity.