O Николаe Угодникe и Касьяне Угоднике у Достоевского (На материале Преступления и наказания)

Abstract

On Nikolai Ugodnik and Kasyan Ugodnik in Dostoevsky (on the material of Crime and Punishment)

The question of the presence of St Nicholas in Dostoevsky’s works has already been studied by literary critics (e.g. Meyer, Nazirov, Agashina). Direct and indirect references to the image or name of St. Nicholas “the Ugodnik” occur many times in Dostoevsky’s fiction (including his novels Humiliated and Insulted, The Gambler, Demons, and The Adolescent) and in his correspondence (see, for example, the writer’s comment about St. Nicholas in his letter to Maikov of the 9th of October 1870: “He will not leave us, because St. Nicholas the Wonderworker is the Russian spirit and Russian unity”). The author of this paper pays special attention to relevant echoes in Crime and Punishment, where the figure of the saint is reflected in the “two Mikolkas” (the drunken peasant who kills the horse in Raskolnikov’s first dream and the old believer who admits to murdering the pawnbroker). These particular echoes of St Nicholas are worth considering in the light of some folklore texts, especially one legend in which St Nicholas is the main person along with his “opponent” Kasyan. In the years of the birth of the plot and the writing of the novel many interesting folklore collections and materials (Yakushkin, Afanasiev) were published, of which Dostoevsky could not have been unaware. There are various hypotheses on the subject of the prototypes of the “two Mikolkas”, but, to the author’s knowledge, the reminiscences of Nicholas the “Ugodnik”, in the character of the painter, and of Kasyan, in the character of Mikolka from Raskolnikov’s dream, have not yet been fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible link (and its reflection on the writer’s imagination) between the evil peasant beating the horse and the “infernal” Saint Kasyan in the light of the legend of Nicholas and Kasyan published in the first issue of Tikhonravov’s Chronicles of Russian Literature and Antiquity.

Keywords: Ugodnik, St Nicholas, St Kasyan, Tikhonravov, Horse, Dream, Crime and Punishment