The Gospel Сontext and its Сonnection with the Prince Myshkin in the Novel «The Idiot» by F. M. Dostoevsky

Abstract

The anthropocentrism of F. M. Dostoevsky’s artistic world, which is associated with the general religious and philosophical vector of his searches, occupies a special place in modern studies of the writer’s work. This article appeals to the evangelical orientations of Dostoevsky’s novel «The Idiot», analyzed through the prism of «whole in the form of a hero», which is given in the novel. The purpose of the work is to designate and describe the meaning- and form-shaping dominants embedded in the image of Prince Myshkin, determining the overall dynamics of the plot and compositional development of the work. This goal is achieved with the use of structural, intertextual and conceptual methods that coexist in research within the hermeneutic approach. Thus, the work attempts to analyze the meaning of the gospel context not only in the process of constituting the «positively beautiful» character of Myshkin, but also in shaping the structure of the novel «The Idiot», its semantic field as a whole. The saturation of the novel with gospel allusions, its structural correlation with the dynamics of the incarnation, the universal loss of God and the hope of the Resurrection that permeates the text are considered here in their direct connection with the author’s ethical and axiological attitudes towards the image of Prince Myshkin