Book topic in the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky “The Brothers Karamazov”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the poetics of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. This problematic area, despite active research attention, still contains a huge potential for further discoveries. The author focuses attention on the actual problem of subject-material representation of artistic space. This work aims is to study book topics, to identify a system of relationships between stable images and motives, which are represented in the text as the lexeme “book” and its derivatives. Based on predecessors’ studies (A. P. Vlaskin, G. Ya. Galagan, L. V. Karasev, N. A. Makaricheva), the author puts forward and defines the idea of the functioning of the “ontological scheme” of the plot, which is formed by the subject-symbol “book”. Despite the relative paucity of plot situations with the point of presence of the book, a wide branching of the scheme is revealed, because of the principle of duality inherent in Dostoevsky’s poetics as well. In conclusion, the author argues about the significance of this “ontological scheme” for understanding the idea of the novel in connection with the breadth of the semantics contained in it: knowledge, memory, enlightenment, change, “second birth”. The article consists of four parts, which examine in detail the functioning of the book topic in different plot fragments: in the preface “From the Author”, in the narrator’s reports about the biography of Smerdyakov and Krasotkin, in the third meeting of Ivan Karamazov with Smerdyakov. The author uses the structural-semiotic method of studying the text with elements of mythopoetic and ontological approaches.