Lászlo F. Földényi
Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and bursts into tears.
Translation: Adan Kovacsics.
Gutenberg Galaxy.
Madrid, 2026.
70 pages
I don’t know if Robert Dussey, Togolese Minister of Foreign Affairs, has read Hegel. But the German philosopher must have jumped in his grave upon learning of the decision of the UN (an almost hopeless institution) to correct the world map to give Africa the magnitude it deserves (see p. 12). Appearance and representation impact consciousness and – hopefully – geopolitics.
Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and breaks down in tears It is the shortest book that I have commented on here, the one with the most unusual title and the one that, in principle, seems to have the least to do with the black world. Until one discovers that, in their Lessons on the philosophy of universal history, Hegel assures that the characteristics of Siberia “do not allow it to be a setting for historical culture nor to create its own form in universal history.” Author of an essay on Goya, the Hungarian thinker László F. Földényi usually puts his finger on paradox and cracks. That is why he detects Dostoyevsky’s despair, suffering in Siberia, “seeing that there in Europe, for whose ideas he had been condemned to death and finally exiled, no attention was paid to his suffering.”
Hegel didn’t think much about Siberia because he had also erased Africa from history. According to Földényi, exclusion and rejection are based on “the terror of what is inconceivable to the European mind, the fear of the incomprehensible, the horror of darkness.” It is true that it describes “the supposedly unstoppable cruelties committed in Africa.” Safe in Berlin, Hegel was not afraid of Africa, but I think Földényi is too generous when he estimates that “in the depths of his heart he only wanted to say, as Rimbaud and Genet would later do, I am a black man.” I did not burst into tears, as Dostoyevsky perhaps did, when he read the author of The phenomenology of the spirit in Siberiabut I was startled by this poetic Hegelian outburst: “This golden country (read Africa) that has remained densely in itself, that country of childhood that, apart from the day of self-conscious history, lives wrapped in the dark colors of the night.” For Hegel, Africa’s contribution to the history and culture of the world has been nothing. By the way, next to the Stories from Kolimaby Varlam Shalámov, the tsarist prisons that Dostoyevsky portrays in his Memories of the dead house They are a spa compared to the Bolshevik gulag, but we would have to go back to the architect of Crime and punishment to reexamine his arguments about the arrogance, blindness and decline of Europe.
One day there may be an answer for Anton Chekhov and Simone Weil about the suffering that humanity has endured. Africa’s quota has been exorbitant. For Földényi, «behind the vehement rejection of Africa and Siberia lies the secret desire to murder God. Hegel was a victim of the mistaken faith in the ability to explain the inexplicable. Reason, science and technology are not enough. Books like this must enlighten us in that scrutiny in which Africa has a lot to say in this century and in the face of a world that is rapidly dehumanizing.
