Dostoevsky’s Idea of the Golden Age

Abstract

This article explores the semantic and intertextual ambience of the concept of the Golden Age as it appears in Stavrogin’s dream in the novel Demons. The motif of the Golden Age is considered a personal symbol deployed in Stavrogin’s dream and in his dualogue with the monk Tikhon. In At Tikhon’s, the originally unpublished chapter of the novel Demons, we can speak about three events and consequently three layers of time: 1/ the story of the little girl; 2/ the dream during the travels in Germany; 3/ the conversation with Tikhon. All together, the three time-layers can be read not only as a temporal structure, but also as three utterances, articulated in three different lan-guages, which are a realization of the meaning-paradigm constituted by the novel. Thus we conclude that the Golden Age reveals the grounding of a new “being-in-the-making” as a “new reality”, constituted by the novel-discourse.