The "revelation dream" metaphor in F.M. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

New methodology positions taken and latest results of cognitive linguistics achieved, we have used all mentioned above to consider the symbolic and prophetic role of dreams in F.M. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Why the writer needs this dream motive is to show how far the main so called "dark" characters have gone from God and to give a kind of a hint to see the falsity of those ways, that is why all the novel's dreams are revelations, and when Dostoevsky describes those of Raskolnikov or Svidrigailov, it is done to metaphorically prove them sinful and distant from God. In this and many other cases, we observe the writer's conceptual Christological metaphor is expressed; it is when a description of something casual and familiar (metaphor source domain) hides a deeply Christian sense (metaphor target domain). To say more, the sense is predefined by Dostoevsky's basic manner that can be defined as characters and spaces Christological metaphorization method. We may even say that the revelation dream becomes Dostoevsky's very special poetic device, and though each dream state can be defined by a set of particular metaphors, they all stay within the general one. Raskolnikov's first can be specified as a prophecy, a premonition, or a warning. In other words, we can call it a victim's metaphor, and the Devil's victim here is Raskolnikov himself. Raskolnikov's second dream, the one just before his crime, is what we call a revelation metaphor which reveals his comparatively good (no blood stains yet) conscience. We even find it right to call this dream a metaphor of Heaven. Circling the novel, it is repeated at its very end, and like in the first case, at the moment of a drastic change in the spiritual mind of the main character. So, Raskolnikov does not decipher his warning dreams and he commits a sin, thus we reckon that the next dream of his (where his host mother is beaten to a pulp by a borough tipstaff) is nothing else but a devilish Sabbath that witnesses the Satan's triumph. The same metaphoric victory is expressed in the dream of the failed attempt of the old pawnbroker murder. Raskolnikov's dream of the homicidal plague (in the epilogue) is in every respect the principal dream: being a revelation, it acts as a warning to the humanity and a metaphoric rendering of the Apocalypse, or the Revelations (ref. St. John the Evangelist's Revelations, chapters 8-17). The dream with a mouse slipping away on the night of Svidrigailov's death is a revelation dream, too. It is a metaphor of his stained conscience. Like Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov can be called a sleeping character (in the author's terms, a sinful one) as contrasted with harmonic (holy souls) characters that are spiritually approaching Christ.

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