F. M. Dostoyevsky’s Explanation of the Petrashevsky Case to the Commission of Inquiry: The Structure of a Documentary and Artistic Whole

Abstract

This article studies F. Dostoyevsky’s Explanation of the Petrashevsky Case from the point of view of the pragmatics and theory of text. The Explanation is regarded as a “strategic response” of the young author in a crisis situation. Relying on legal and institutional discourse, Dostoyevsky proceeds to personal discourse, which implies the use of the author’s strategies, and mechanisms intended to control the reader’s perception and evaluations. In the Explanation , one can single out factual, subtextual, conceptual, and aesthetic types of information, as well as strategies of evading direct answers to questions, discussion of more general issues instead of providing specific answers; reducing the legal tone of the situation, the principle of opposition, and the creation of an individualised psychological image of a participant of M. V. Petrashevsky’s meetings, as well as the substitution of fiction for truth. A symmetrical analysis of the Explanation demonstrates that Dostoyevsky puts the information which is essential for the formation of the reader’s perception into a strong position, i.e. at the beginning, at the end or in the middle, thus creating a system of leitmotifs in the argumentation field. Hence, the author uses techniques of manipulation to influence the recipient’s subconscious, which enables him to reach his aesthetic, rhetorical, and pragmatic goals, establishes a direction of reading and a vector for the reader’s understanding of the text.