The Orient in the creative mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky during the Crimean war

The article is supported by RHSF grant no. 15-34-01258 "Concept of the East in the prose and journalism of F.M. Dostoevsky". The article analyses the image of the Orient that developed in Fyodor Dostoevsky's creative mind in 1854-1856, when he was discharged from prison in Omsk and settled in Semipalatinsk, the Muslim frontier of the Russian Empire. Dostoevsky's Russian orientalism can be described as a complex multidimensional phenomenon represented in the most of large and small genres of his prose, sketches and notes, journalism, epistolary heritage, and in his few poetic works. The writer's orientalism sheds light on the evolution of his creative method that combines journalistic, autobiographical, philosophical and psychological elements. Dostoevsky assumed that his epilepsy that developed in the Muslim Asia was deeply symbolic. He perceived it through religious and mythological categories: due to Pushkin and A. de Kazimirski, the translator of the Quran, Dostoevsky perceived Mahomet as the great poet-epileptic, thus creating the image of the Orient that combined cultural codes with his personal life-long anxieties and fears. The description of the Orient as a category of Dostoevsky's creative mind requires focusing on the orientalist scale of civilization developed by the colonial discourse of Western Europe and Russia in the 18th - 19th centuries, with the developed West and the barbaric Orient as its end points. The 1854-1856-s was a crucial period in Dostoevsky's life and work. It was when he formed the basic principles of the ambivalent correlation between the sacred, infernal, barbarous and civilized in the discourse of Orientalism. His movement in the Oriental space coincides with the civilizational clash between Russia, the West and the Muslim world during the Crimean (Eastern) war. In the nineteenth century Russian Orientalism rapidly evolved and most strongly influenced the literary process in the time of Russian-European conflicts about the Orient. The research is based on the letter from Fyodor Dostoevsky to his brother of January 30 - February 22, 1854, and his poems that are thematically related to the Crimean war: "On European events in 1854" (1854), "On the first of July, 1855" (1855) and "On the coronation and conclusion of peace" (1856).

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