Роман Ф.М. Достоевского «Подросток» в исследованиях русских авторов первой половины XX века: аналитический обзор

Abstract

The history of the perception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent in the first half of the 20th century is divided into two qualitatively different periods: the Silver Age and the 1920s-1940s. The peculiarity of the first one is the discovery of Dostoevsky as a philosopher and religious thinker, while the second is characterized by the awareness of him as an original artist. Therefore, in the first period, “ideological” and “spiritual” interpretations of The Adolescent prevailed (D.S. Merezhkovsky, V.F. Pereverzev, N.A. Berdyaev, and others), in the second — scientific studies of his poetics and especially of the manuscript corpus (V.L. Komarovich, A.L. Bem, G.I. Chulkov, A.S. Dolinin, and others). The development of the main areas of study of The Adolescent in the 1920s and 1940s (biography, psychoanalysis, and poetics) is considered in chronological order. There is no clear distinction between Soviet and emigrant researchers, although it is stated the difference in the conditions in which they worked. Among more than three dozen works with subtle observations, compelling intuitions, and important discoveries, the article recognizes the peak of the study of The Adolescent during these years in the chapter dedicated to the novel in the book Dostoevsky. Life and Creativity (1947) by the emigrant scholar Konstantin Mochulsky. The work, nourished by almost the entire research discourse on both sides of the USSR border, combines religious-philosophical and formal-aesthetic approaches to the novel and offers a holistic view of its problems; nevertheless, it is free from traces of the ideological coercion that Soviet scientists experienced in the 1930s and 1940s.