Ф. М. Достоевский

In «The Idiot» by F. M. Dostoevsky we encounter a special genre of an ordeal novel: the hero enters the portrayed world with the mission of salvation. In this article the theme of fate appears of interest for the interpretation, which, being an intermediate concept, has connotations associated with death, chance, freedom, with the theme of the road.

The approaches to ‘thematic motives’ of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot outlined by A. P. Skaftymov in the 1920s unintentionally shed light on how the scientist comprehended the motives of love in A. P. Chekhov’s comedy The Cherry Orchard.

‘Insulted and humiliated’ is one of F. M. Dostoyevsky’s recurrent themes. It remains up-to-date in the last period of his creative work related to Staraya Russa. This town became the prototype of Skotoprigonievsk from The Brothers Karamazov and the small town Afimievsk from the novel The Adolescent. In Dostoyevsky’s letters, in his wife’s memoires, in the reports of the writer’s friends from Staraya Russa there crop up the recollections of the citizens, who can be considered the prototypes of the ‘insulted and humiliated’ in these novels.

The article studies the images of the leading characters in the novels A Raw Youth by Dostoyevsky and Virgin Soil by Turgenev. The main idea of the article is to highlight the image of an illegitimate character as a separate archetype in literature.

The article presents the results of studying F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel’s Notes from Underground from the point of view of researching the issue of another’s view in the writer’s creative oeuvre.The evidence obtained from the text analysis allows to single out some characteristic features of the visual behavior of the ‘underground man’, as well as to expand the interpretation of the novel.

The article attempts to identify the key moments of F. Dostoevsky’s presence in the context of the literary and critical declarations of the journal Zavety, primarily, by its co-editors, V. Chernov, and especially by Ivanov-Razumnik. His attitude towards the writer as a “world genius”, “the apogee of ethical individualism”, expressed in a number of articles, should be considered programmatic for this journal. A. Dolinin’s critical reception and reviews in the bibliographic department are in line with this attitude.

F. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) exerted a considerable influence on American literature since 1940s. The works by outstanding authors beginning with Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944) or Jerome Salinger’s prose and up to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Percy Walker, David Foster Wallace, show a persistent fascination of American writers with the novella and are based on re-reading and re-interpreting Dostoevsky’s ideas, motives and imagery.