Dynamics of Narrative Motives in Dostoevsky’s and Mamleev’s Novels

Abstract

The article traces the intertextual recoding of the iconic motifs of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” (1866) in two conceptual novels by Yu.V. Mamleev “Wings of Horror” (1993) and “Wandering Time” (2000). In the process of analysis, the plot-forming role of the motive of voluptuousness in the works of Dostoevsky and Mamleev is revealed and its antinomic mystical-metaphysical modification is emphasized, as well as the semiotics of this motive in the ideological and compositional whole of these novels are compared. It is established that in “Wandering Time” the ideological murderers Raskolnikov and Poseev are divorced and converge through double recoding, the logic of which is due to the difference in the artistic and metaphysical views of both writers. The dynamics of such end-to-end images-symbols as “louse”, old woman (old man), “axe” is also studied in a comparative way. As a result, in comparison with previous studies, the framework of the “Dostoevsky code” in the novelistics of the founder of “metaphysical realism” is expanded and a number of its components gets comprehension. It becomes obvious that the reception of Dostoevsky by Mamleev consciously uses a segment of the language of Russian culture, of which Dostoevsky’s motives, images, symbols and concepts, as well as the meta-text that has arisen around them, to produce new meanings relevant, according to the writer of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, spiritual and aesthetic trends of our modernity. The relevance of the article lies in the expansion of the analysis of Dostoevsky’s reception in the literature of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Scholarly novelty lies in the priority attraction of new material (Mamleev’s novelistics) and the hypothesis about the antinomic character of the motif of mystical voluptuousness. The conclusions of the article are obtained taking into account the scholarly context on the issues under study and call for further discussion.