When poets said farewell to happiness: Baudelaire and Dostoievski criticize the utopian thoughts

Abstract

This article discusses the meaning of literature as historical source. Its first objective is to put into question a way of interpretation which today is predominant, and by which one reads literary texts as representations of a given reality. Therefore, two texts of Baudelaire and Dostoievski are discussed, where the writers inscribed the freedom of will at the center of the act of reading. The proposal, inspired by the poetics of both writers, is to perceive literature as an intended intervention, ethical and political, in the conflicts of a certain period, by the means of the via obliqua of the fictional act.