October 30, 2026

A.I. Dostoyevsky


A.I. Dostoyevsky
The real Dostoyevsky, in oil. Painting by Vasily Perov, 1872.

On October 22, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-run, English-language outlet Russia Today, and one of the leading figures in Russian propaganda, posted a video featuring an AI-generated image of the writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. In the clip, AI Fyodor quotes from his work, “A Writer’s Diary,” reflecting on how Russians should not “adopt European tastes.”

“Our Russian ideas are unknown in the West,” says the digital avatar. “It ended with them outright calling us enemies and future destroyers of European civilization.”

“Dostoevsky will now be a regular political expert on RT,” Simonyan announced, implying that more such videos are yet to come.

While Dostoevsky was a great writer, he is also known for having strongly conservative, even xenophobic, political views, making him an ideal figure for anti-Western rhetoric.

This is not the first time Fyodor Mikhailovich has been posthumously used for state ends. While he was alive, he was something of a cultural icon for official imperial conservatism. As a result, Soviet authorities had a very complicated relationship with his memory. At first, they tried to erase him entirely, but then they rebranded him as a defender of the “humiliated and insulted,” someone who depicted the hardships of ordinary people oppressed by the privileged classes.

In the twenty-first century, in the speeches of Russian politicians and on state media, Dostoevsky has become one of the country's most quoted literary giants. And just like the Soviet propagandists before them, modern polemicists employ selective quotation, taking words out of context, ignoring Dostoyevsky's thoughts and statements that do not align with their goals.

In the USSR, for example, Dostoyevsky's deep religiosity and hatred of revolutionaries were ignored. Today, the focus is on his reflections on Russian identity, while Fyodor Mikhailovich’s calls for universal Christian reconciliation are completely ignored.

 

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