The article is devoted to the history of comparing the works of William
Blake and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The author starts with the lectures of Andre Gide in
the 1920s, in which he used quotes from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell to clarify
Dostoevsky. Gide believed that both authors were united by the devil theme and the
fascination with evil and started the tradition of comparing Blake with Dostoevsky
and Nietzsche, reflected in the works of Jean Wahl and Georges Bataille. American
scholar Melvin Rader united Blake and Dostoevsky in rethinking the structure of the
Christian Trinity and the image of the demiurge. Colin Wilson also compared Blake,
Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche in their attitude to Christianity, confirming the tradition of
attributing Blake to the literature of modernism. Czesław Miłosz in the 1970s unites
Blake and Dostoevsky as visionaries at the end of the Christian stage of history: both
of them passionately note the terrifying fall of mankind into the abyss of the material
world and the inability to survive there in its former guise. The Swedish-English
researcher D. Gustafsson in his articles of the 2010s defended the idea of an inner
unity between the writings of Blake and Dostoevsky: the fiery Orc of Blake has the
same nature as the young revolutionaries of Dostoevsky, and goes the same way from
rebel to tyrant. In the opera of Alexander Belousov in Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in
Moscow, “The Book of Seraphim” (2020), Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin and Blake's Thel
are combined. The director interprets the desire of Thel and Stavrogin to get out of
innocence into experience, and the dance of Stavrogin with Thel-Matryosha is not an
act of violence, but an act of young passion. Thus, the English romanticist Blake and
the Russian realist Dostoevsky have a serious and interesting history of comparison.
William Blake and F. M. Dostoevsky: a History of Comparison