Dostoevsky’s “Uncanny” Disease

This chapter is less interested in what the “uncanny” is, in any immanent or substantial sense, and instead begins by asking: When is the “uncanny”, and can it be more properly historicised? Following philosopher and psychoanalyst Mladen Dolar’s remarks, I inquire into the relationship between the “uncanny” and the Enlightenment, as evidenced in the literary works and personal correspondences of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Taking Sigmund Freud’s citation of Schelling in his original 1919 essay on the “uncanny” as my point of departure, this requires a German-Russian epistemology of the “uncanny” which considers adjacent developments in science and speculative philosophy, followed by an analysis of “uncanny” features across three of Dostoevsky’s early works, concluding in the affirmative: across a genealogy running through galvanism, physics, opera and fiction, the “uncanny” arguably reflected an early response (and notable ambivalence) to the social changes brought on by the Enlightenment.