Interpretation of the Book «Boys» from F. M. Dostoevsky’s Novel «The Karamazov Brothers»: An Experience of Combining Structural Semiotic and Hermeneutic Approaches

Abstract

In the article, within the framework of a semiotic approach to literature, an attempt to interpret the tenth book «Boys» of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel «The Karamazov Brothers» is made. With the help of Yu. Lotman’s structural semiotic method, in which the discreteness of a text’s semantics is postulated as its essential property, the validity of considering a single, «completed» fragment of an integral work in a semantic sense for the purpose of its hermeneutic reading is justified. While involving G. Bogin’s typology of understanding, we are trying to interpret the book «Boys» in terms of its compositional and architectonic place in the structure of the integral novel. Due to the selected theoretical and methodological coordinates, the author of this article comes to the following conclusions. First, such a way of studying the text’s content makes it much easier to understand, since the main focus is not on the novel as a whole, but on a specific segment of it. Secondly, the book «Boys» in a semantic sense reflects the architectonic (ideological) organization of the entire work. Our theoretical and methodological coordinates allowed us to identify the theocentric intentions that embed the analyzed part of the text into the poetics of the entire novel «The Karamazov Brothers»