Книги в романе Идиот

Abstract

Books in The Idiot

One of the most characteristic features of F. M. Dostoevsky’s artistic world is that many of the characters in his works, with great zeal and passion, read, discuss, translate, interpret and analyse, buy and sell, give away, borrow from and lend to each other, and write a wide variety of books. And it must be said that the mention of a book in Dostoevsky’s texts is never accidental or random, but inevitably introduces an additional dimension to the main stories, which can thus expand and deepen in an extraordinary way, incorporating the complexly interpreted meanings of the book that was mentioned, as well as its genre form, ranging from the everyday and historical anecdote, the feuilleton, the magazine and newspaper article, to the evangelical parable and the apocalyptic prophecy. However, even against the background of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, the novel The Idiot stands out in terms of the number of books it contains. In this novel, the books not only additionally involve the reader in the rich context of social thought and world culture of that time and previous centuries, but also form or clarify the character and behaviour of the characters, create extremely important additional plot and semantic lines, and pose acute questions to the reader at all possible levels of the understanding of the text. Our project was dedicated to studying these features and properties of the books included in the novel.

Keywords: The Idiot, Book as a theme, Books in literature, Solovyev's Russkaya Istoria, Madame Bovary, Dame aux camélias