Dreamers and ideologists in F.M. Dostoevsky's world in the light of madness phenomenology
Dostoevsky's world was characterized by researchers through the prism of the notion "fantastic realism", also regarded as carnival-like or shapeless. In this regard, the madness phenomenon is becoming significant being one of the most important displacing variants, deviance, irrationally grotesque reality modeling. Madness phenomenology appears at all Dostoevsky's anthropology levels. Moreover, this irrational deflection of a human image should influence the way the great novelist models mind activities and demonstrates the world of dream and idea. An important role on the way from a dream to an idea has a story The Double that Belinsky criticized for whimsicality not accepting the specific solution of the madness problem the young writer offered. The reason for it, in our opinion, lies in the fact that Belinsky, like all other critics of Dosto-evsky's time, evaluated The Double within the literature tradition of "bourgeois psychology" and "daydreaming", while Dostoevsky demonstrated the first sketch of a character-ideologist. Applying the "character-ideologist" category to the main character of the story The Double even taking into consideration these options might seem disputable. Golyadkin is the first character striving for activity (which must be understood as a way of daydream overcoming). A dream implies passivity while a character-ideologist is active. A dream and an idea are connected and opposite at the same time. A dream gives birth to an idea that brings an absolutely new quality to a thought that transfers it out of the field of ideation into the field of activity. But how does this quality transformation, a specific performance changing a thought into an existence, happen? How is this gap between a dream and an action bridged? A philosopher's stone of this transmutation is madness. The madness factor has been mentioned in many examples of a dream - action transformation in Dostoevsky's works, starting with Roskolnikov's disgusting dream (14, vol. 6, p. 7) and finishing with Dmitry Karamazov's "my dream, my delirium" (14, vol. 14, p. 143). It is The Double where this peculiarity appears for the first time though in a specific grotesque-parabolic way. Striving for activity, dreamer Golyadkin is ready for it and gives birth to a double, a reverse derivate that has power for activity. An abyss between a dream and an active idea is crossed by an irrational leap as if a move out of an EGO into a double. Ultimately, an impossible transit from ideation into real existence becomes possible on the lawless madness territory. The contemporaries did not accept the artistic model of transition to an idea the author of The Double offered. Dostoevsky had to address another type of a character and model this transformation in a different way. His dreamer becomes an obsessed and sick ideologist, firstly, through the infernal (The Mistress) and then through the clinical in the latest novels, but The Double might be regarded as an effluent of it. The critics' rejection of this story only delayed the formation of a character-ideologist.
Keywords
Ф.М. Достоевский, история русской литературы, безумие, мечтатель, идеолог, фантастический реализм, «Двойник», Dostoevsky, Russian literature history, madness, dreamer, ideologist, fantastic realism, The DoubleAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Medvedeva Diana А. | Tomsk State University | d.a.medvedeva@mail.ru |
Kazakov Alexey А. | Tomsk State University | akaz75@mail.ru |
References

Dreamers and ideologists in F.M. Dostoevsky's world in the light of madness phenomenology | Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiya – Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 2015. № 4 (36).