It is a very brief essay, but one of extraordinary philosophical density. Földényi begins with an episode that functions almost like a symbolic scene: Dostoyevsky, exiled in Siberia, comes into contact with Hegel’s conception of history and discovers, painfully, that from the perspective of that philosophy his own world—Siberia, suffering, the condemned, peoples regarded as peripheral—seems to lie outside true history.
The author thus contrasts two radically different ways of understanding existence. On the one hand, Hegel and his confidence in a reason capable of discovering the rational meaning of history; on the other, Dostoyevsky and the experience of suffering, freedom, sin, redemption, and that which resists being enclosed within a rational system.
It is a meditation on the dangers of trying to turn human history into a perfectly intelligible system. Földényi suggests that when a theory claims to explain man completely, it can end up justifying the sacrifice of certain human beings in the name of a supposed better future.
It reads quickly, but it is not a superficial book. It contains many concentrated ideas and deserves to be read slowly.