From Graphics to Calligraphy: textological Study of the Semantics and Poetcis of F. M. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Abstract

Abstract The article contains an analysis of the manuscript materials to the novel The Idiot, comprised in three of Dostoevsky’s notebooks, dated bewteen 1867 and 1868. The article examines the probelms of the creative conception of the novel, the establishment of the text and the sequence of notes, as well as the study of Dostoevsky’s caligraphy. As a result of a critical evaluation of the scholarly publications of The Idiot, a revision of the Soviet tradition of establishing «versions» of the novel in the drafts to the novel is proposed. Comparing the published draft texts with the original, we were able to correct and give textological commentary to many previous readings of the drafts. We paid particular attention to the interpretation of Dostoevsky’s use of capital and small letters in the drafts, including the designation of the main hero by Dostoevsy as «idiot»/«Idiot». We examined the functional and semantic significance of the caligraphic writing found among the drafts to the novel. Our analysis shows that caligraphy had an artistic meaning not only in connection with the drafts to which it related but in the formation of the total conception of the novel and its problem statement, while it also determined Dostoevsky’s creative process. It is not an accident that Dostoevsky’s most intense experimentation with caligraphy coincides with the period of the writing of The Idiot, whose hero is an expert in caligraphy.