«Мистический вздор» или «Последнее милосердие»?

(Два способа прочтения рассказа Ф.М. Достоевского Бобок)

Abstract

"Mystical Nonsense" or "'Final Mercy'?" (Two ways of reading F.M. Dostoevsky's story Bobok)

The short story Bobok, published in February 1873 as part of the Writer's Diary, is one of the major works in Dostoevsky's entire creative legacy in terms of the depth and acuteness of its existential problems. To clarify the artistic nature of this story, it will be productive to include it in a number of Dostoevsky's creative works, the dominant genre-compositional architectonics of which is an openly expressed fantastic element. A striking moment of essential closeness between The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Bobok are the pictures of the posthumous stay of the heroes of the two works in the cemetery in graves without movement, but in fullness of consciousness and feelings. However, the similarity of the grave scenes in their naturalistic concreteness sharpens the contrast of artistic solutions of the two stories, making them a peculiar diptych among the works of "small prose" published in the pages of Dostoevsky's Writer's Diary. The main point is that Bobok's characters enthusiastically accept the afterlife, rejecting another perspective of postmortem existence as "mystical delusion". We will turn to the artistic conception of this highly unusual story.

Keywords: Bobok; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; The Afterlife; Fantastic