Confrontation of sentimental, romantic and "natural" models of madness and its reflection in the literary works of F.M. Dostoevsky

The article deals with one of the formation stages of the artistic conception of madness in Dosto-evsky's works: the writer connects all variants of understanding madness, trying to convey a non-linear multidimensionality of madness in reality. His appeal to this problem comes amid the controversy over insanity between V.G. Belinsky and V.F. Odoyevsky, between materialistic analytism of the natural school and romantic synthetism. Reflecting on his work in both versions, the great novelist is exploring the possibility of a third way: the sentimental concept of oddity. In the article, the authors reconstruct the specified madness modeling context in Dostoevsky's world and consistently analyze the romantic, "natural" and sentimental concepts of madness. As shown in the work, in V.F. Odoevsky's works and in I.G. Belinsky's critical heritage the phenomenon of madness is perceived as a representative marker of the artistic anthropology of romanticism and the natural school. The problem of madness is extremely important for V.F. Odoevsky. It is enough to recall that the original "Russian Nights" was called "Madhouse". "Insane" and "Night" are interchangeable metaphors of irrational essence of reality. In the story "Who's Crazy?" V.F. Odoevsky tries to explain the difference between a high and a low option by going beyond the boundaries of mind from inside of his madness model. Being romantic, the writer believes that true madness has a high sense, because the oddball ("odd man" in Dostoevsky's novels) is able to combine items in his consciousness not according to conventional ideas, but according to their true nature. If madness in romanticism opens abilities to the highest vision in a man, for the proponents of the natural school madness is nothing but a disease of consciousness, it is not ascension but degradation. In this case, the boundaries of the human are overcome in another direction. V.G. Belinsky is polemically opposed to V. F. Odoevsky. He opposed the "apotheosis of madness", which he sees in this romanticist's work. After the publication of "The Double" Dostoevsky suffered similar accusations from the criticism. The sentimental model of a man played a decisive role in the internal polemics between young F.M. Dostoevsky and the artistic techniques of the natural school, as it was understood by V.G. Belinsky. The same principle applies in the context of the insanity problem. Dostoevsky draws a sentimental model of madness: the image of an odd man. He stands at the bottom of the social pyramid, but the specific internal truth which he possesses can be worth more than all the rest, can show the falsity and the inessentiality of this pyramid. The article also examines the literary context of the sentimental madness model in Dostoevsky's works, the authors offer a comparison of the oddball concept in F.M. Dostoevsky's, N. S. Leskov's and Ch. Dickens' works, whose creativity can be considered the main source of the image of the oddball for these Russian writers.

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