'The brothers Karamazov' and 'On the open road': F. M. Dostoevsky and Steve Tesich's moral imperative

The present paper strives to analyze the play On the Open Road, the most famous and most popular play by American-Serbian playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich, comparing some of its elements and ideas to F. M. Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, whose episodic interpolation yet its moral centre - the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, inspired Tesich to use the motif of Christ's Second Coming in his play. In this play, Tesich deliberately resorts to allegory in order to critically perceive and react to the growing deterioration of the moral sensibility of Western civilization embroiled in hypocrisy and lies. The murder of Christ, from Tesich's perspective, is a dramatic example of the process of killing what is best in man, a process that is constantly repeated in the dehumanized social order that is imposed by force, and persists due to the use of force. Tesich, as well as his contemporary Arthur Miller, dramatizes the killing of God in man as the killing and drying up of man's creative potentialities and conscience. .