a Critique of Dostoevsky Worldview of suffering

This article argues that suffering in Dostoevsky’s fiction is not a universal human experience but a distinctly male one. While Dostoevsky frames suffering as a path toward moral fall, confession, and rebirth, this transformative trajectory is available only to male characters. Women in his novels possess roles but lack worlds; they function as mediators of male redemption rather than subjects of suffering and existential change. To articulate this structural divide, the article introduces the “dual architecture of suffering”: a male architecture that is linear, moral, and outcome‑oriented, and a female architecture that is spatial, structural, and without exit. Female suffering in Dostoevsky neither generates meaning nor leads to awareness or rebirth. The article concludes that Dostoevsky’s philosophy of suffering operates only when female suffering remains absent, and that this absence fundamentally undermines his claim to the universality of human suffering.Keywords: Dostoevsky, suffering, gender, existentialism, feminism, narrative architecture