On Illustrating Dostoevsky’s Works

Abstract

The article addresses several problematic aspects related to the illustration of F. M. Dostoevsky's literary works. Illustration in particular is one of the major ways to create an “artistic aura” surrounding a literary text. Owing to the visual interpretation of verbal imagery, a new associative layer and a possibility of reinterpretations of the text are able to emerge. The author argues that illustrating novels of one of the greatest Russian writers is a task of special complexity. First of all, this is due to the fact that Dostoevsky's literary portrait is based on different principles than his own. It is primarily linked to the fact that Dostoevsky's literary portrait is based on principles that differ from those of his contemporaries, such as Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. External descriptiveness and detailed portrayal of the character retreat in the texts of Dostoevsky before the “energy of contradictions” inherent in the initial portrait of his heroes. As a result, the task of an artist illustrating novels by the Russian literary genius proves arduous: he must convey, first and foremost, the dynamics of personality formation of Raskolnikov, Myshkin, or Dmitri Karamazov, rather than stable recognizability and their physiological individuality. This perspective is applied in order to analyze the work of a variety of prominent illustrators in the light of Dostoevsky's ideas and anthropology. The author of the present study reveals the discrepancies between the writer's world and the embodiment of the characters' images in the illustration. Likewise, he identifies the ways in which, from his point of view, the most striking matches between verbal and visual images appear possible.