Dostoyevsky, Machado de Assis: “What Is to Be Done’ about the end to servitude and slavery

Abstract

Modernization projects in nineteenth-century Russia and Brazil coexisted with the legacies of servile work and slavery. While in Russia part of the intelligentsia reacted to the Emancipation by means of the conveying of revolutionary proposals – such as those outlined in the novel ‘What Is to Be Done?” by N. Chernyshevsky – in Brazil a sector of the intellectual elite became engaged in the propagation of racialist and conservative theories. In a period of redefinitions and the emergence of various future projects and perspectives appreciative of the past, two of the biggest names in literature in both countries – Machado de Assis and Dostoyevsky – formulated literary expressions on the historical contexts in which they were inserted, marked as they were by the abolition of slavery and servile work, respectively. By means of his literary and journalistic output, Dostoyevsky became involved in controversial exchanges with the intellectual left and its support for direct action, known as they were as Russian ‘nihilists”. Machado de Assis argued with those supporting modernization promoting exclusion, based on biologizing notions and their application to society. Both authors left criticism and literary works on the consequences of different abolitionist process.