A.M. Burov

Face and Amalgam: An Analysis of Dostoevsky's The Idiot

He looked at her; in her face and in her figure

part of the fresco came to life, which he always now

I tried to see in it, even if only mentally,

when they were not together...

Marcel Proust. towards Svan.

And if he stopped, then not then,

to think, and not then to dream,

Then the look of his whitish eyes rested on the ground,

blind to her charms, to her benefit...

...Here he starts again, continues wandering,

moves from light to shadow, from shadow to light, without noticing it.

Samuel Beckett. Malone dies.

Portrait-Photo

1. Prince Myshkin often peers, and this peering is like a description of the inner world another for people is extraordinary. If there is something absurd in his behavior - be it ridiculous gestures, silence, or long stories told (and all about death), then this can always be attributed to his some strangeness, very good-natured, however, given that he is long was not at home and that he was really ill. But his gaze is marked by inexplicable insight. Behind his gaze, if it really is a gaze, there is always something, for the gaze is directed per

face. The gaze of Ganya and Rogozhin is always only friction, the essence of which is the sliding / rubbing of the eye on the surface of the person of interest. But even these two heroes of the novel, who have received the privilege of insight from discourse and gliding over their faces with all the thoroughness of light radiation, are fascinated by the surface no less than Myshkin by depth.

“Rogozhin himself turned into one fixed look. He could not tear himself away from Nastasya Filippovna, he was drunk, he was in seventh heaven.

To peer into a face, Myshkin needs to stop it at least for a moment, and sometimes even compare it with another face. So, to describe Alexandra, the prince compares her with Holbein's Madonna, which he had the opportunity to examine calmly and with all care in the museum. Alexandra has the same strange sadness expressed in Madonna's face: the same regular and calm face in the upper part (large eyelids and a large forehead), dynamic, even as if tense in the lower part (wavy horizon of the lips, a small dimple on the chin). And the look that the prince catches at Alexandra among many simple eye movements is also a look like Holbein's Madonna: covered with large eyelids, kind and sad.

In order to do something like this operation with Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin did not need to look for a picturesque portrait: he was lucky in the form of a photograph. Nastasya Filippovna can only be compared with herself. Myshkin, even with a photograph in front of him, can hardly describe Nastasya Filippovna. The variability and "fluency" of the face, the contradictory and incompatible features struck the prince: "... immense pride and contempt, almost hatred were in this face, and at the same time something trusting, something surprisingly simple-hearted ...". The prince notices the suffering in the face, expressed in punctum *, in that he is aiming at him, which makes him draw attention to himself, which hurts. The prince discovers this detail in two bones under the eyes at the beginning of the cheeks. Tears roll into this place and sometimes freeze there, and the palms, when the pain is unbearable, squeeze the eyes. Examining the face of this woman, the prince sees the hollowness of her cheeks, then raises his gaze higher and meets her eyes, horrified by the contrast.

* punctums - “pricks”, uncoded points that spontaneously, without passing through cultural filters, attack the eyes ( Bart R. camera lucida).

Photography, as an infinite similarity, captivates the eye and, hiding the truth from it, tells a parable about the similarity of a person to his image. Such is the situation of sending an image showing the heroine, who is only destined to meet the prince. This image that fascinates Myshkin, this photographic stoppage of time is the first step towards understanding the one that is always moving. However, it would be more correct to say not “understanding”, but “identification”, because understanding a person stopped in a moment is also difficult, if not more difficult, than deciphering him in a moving reality. Because the photo in no way reveals the meaning, as something silent and not burdened with movement. The photograph itself is burdened with a quiet static, and the captured object does not really seek to prolong itself, but, on the contrary, longs for the disappearance that gives it true freedom from the priorities of life. And if there is something most appropriate to the state of Nastasya Filippovna, it is a photo - like a physical and psychological disappearance for oneself and for others.

And the comparison of the static face in the photo with the moving face of the referent represents the shock of conformity/discrepancy that Myshkin discovered at the first meeting. The prince shuddered and stepped back in amazement, and her eyes flashed and seemed to reflect the look of the prince, she pushed him out of the way with her shoulder, and the prince almost immediately found himself behind her; then he went to report along with the fur coat, returned and again began to peer into it. Nastasya Filippovna laughed, and the prince, like a mirror, also grinned, but he could not speak. He turned pale and began to resemble her in outward features: the same sunken cheeks, the same laughter and the same pallor. Of course, at first glance. But mirroring for the prince is not a mere coincidence, it is an attempt to stop Nastasya Filippovna in the way that women usually stop in front of a mirror in order to peer into it themselves, especially since for her it is still nothing.

“A mirror hangs on the side wall; she does not think of him, but it thinks of her! It seizes her image, like a devoted and faithful slave, grasping the slightest change in the features of his mistress. And, like a slave, it can only perceive, but not embrace, its image.

Mirroring, on the other hand, in the performance of the prince - an attempt to survive, to get rid of the shock in static, and what Nastasya Filippovna expressed on her face movably, to stop and feel on herself. This is how a shock is experienced, at the moment of which the prince does not leave an attempt to understand.

Photography is a threshold and boundary for understanding depth, it is a film behind which there is depth, but which will never break through and become transparent; never look behind her. Photo is dead image of the dead, what was alive a second ago, the image in the photo already not a face, not a face, but a mask. In the case of Nastasya Filippovna: the mask is like ( already e as) the memory of the face and face, already like something that has happened and frozen. Even before the appearance of Nastasya Filippovna, her photographic a tragedy, which in the novel is looped by death: a photo as a correlation with death, and between them there is a story of a struggle of voices: face and face.

face-face

1. Myshkin looks on the Aglaya's face, but not in face. The inexplicable thirst to break through human beauty in order to see spiritual beauty fails. The gaze, which constantly peers, breaks against the wall of glossy photographicity with tints of grimace - (the surface of the face, when light hits it, begins to shine like a glossy photograph, or, conversely, show itself completely: while picture motionless). Such is the beauty of Aglaya - the shock of change and the static nature of the foundation at the same time; her face does not have that absolute movement that Nastasya Filippovna has, for nothing is erased, and there is no visual amnesia that accompanies Nastasya Filippovna's face in any circumstances. The movements of Aglaya's face are obvious, because they are entirely focused on external changes: grimaces and redness, while the face does not change on itself, the face in itself is a change. Here everything is a consequence and cause of blocking: the way inside is closed.

Aglaya's face does not change, but changes, and only within its own limits, while the face of Nastasya Filippovna torments the prince precisely by changing facial copies; among which, like at first glance identical frames of a film, there is an unrevealed change, which is so difficult to detect and which captivates with its frozen smallness and meaningful simplicity. And if you look long and hard at Aglaya, as the prince does, you can definitely declare a certain terrible and tragic stiffness of her face, which has already been imprinted with an unhappy fate. And if Myshkin needs to stop the face of Nastasya Filippovna (the photograph is a precious find for him), because

it's too cinematic together, then he needs, on the contrary, to set Aglaya's face in motion, so that among its changes he can see, as if through a crack, the only true - spirit sheep beauty.

Aglaya's unwillingness to reveal her immobility, the non-faciality of her face, and the attempt to replace it with feigned mobility is a fear of being discovered and understood, a fear of withdrawal. A face frozen in its beauty is natural an obstacle on the way to what should be called Spiritual beauty. Hence some ambiguity in the perception of the prince, because his gaze is so strong that Aglaya gets a strange impression of his physiology and even physiognomy: once she says to him: “Why are you looking at me like that, prince? I am afraid of you; It seems to me that you want to reach out your hand and touch my face with your finger in order to feel it.

2. All the prince's peering and his unintentional actions (however subordinate to this very goal) are a search (or a temptation to search?) That which is always distinguishable from the face and that stands on the other side of it, namely - Search Lika.

«… face is the manifestation of ontology.<…>Everything that is accidental, caused by reasons external to this being, in general, everything in the face that is not the face itself, is pushed aside here by the energy of the image of God, which has filled with a key and made its way through the thickness of the material crust: the face has become face. The face is the likeness of God realized in the face. When before us is the likeness of God, we have the right to say: this is the image of God, and the image of God means that Depicted in this image, its Prototype. The face, in itself, as contemplated, is evidence of this archetype; and those who have transformed their face into a face proclaim the secrets of the invisible world without words, by their very appearance.

The face is pushed aside and the likeness of God appears through it. Passes through the face face, which is bequeathed by God and is hidden behind the human manifestation, for the face is the manifestation. The face is evidence of the prototype, in it spiritual beauty is proclaimed without words. In Nastasya Filippovna, two voices appear in turn, but up to a certain point, face and face are never merged. Along with this moment comes death, death from this strange equilibrium, when the face and face coincided and overlapped each other: the face cooled down in the face, and the voices ceased to sound. Between face and face there is no longer the last distance, and two opposites marked death (physiognomically expressed in a mask), in which there is no

one or the other. face and face now exist precisely as the inside and the face, located on the same plane of the mask, in the same coordinates of death, for they settled down and died. And if - metaphorically - the reflection of Nastasya Filippovna's face in the mirror is the face, and the face itself is the face, then death will consist in the fact that already there is no spatial distance between the reflection and the object, the distance ceased to exist, and everything merged in an instant.

The impossibility of forever discovering either the face or the face in/on Nastasya Filippovna and the extremely strong alternation of both (even if projected onto the plot: an endless series of running away from Myshkin to Rogozhin and vice versa) led to such an inverse differentiation that it simply disappeared and both - only a dead mask remained as a memory of the face and face - and at some point a flash of facial inversion led to a crime against the body. Physiognomic death underwent a transition into physiological death, and although this transition was probably faster than an instant, it nevertheless existed, for one was the cause, the other the effect. Inversion of spatial and temporal acceleration - the death of a person.

This transition, like an instantaneous explosion of light, is a truly amazing spiritual prick for others, because what some time ago was pain and a blow for Myshkin and Rogozhin, in other words, those punctums that existed precisely as a wound and a prick, are now in one moment ceased to be.

Punctums - these small dots on the face, these pre-face materials of the face, in the end, become a face only when they fill the entire space of the face. In the photo, these forerunners of the face are clearly visible (bones below the eyes) or not clearly (something undiscovered, but pricking the prince). Punctums formation, which flicker already on the referent itself, make the face visible and disappear with it, giving way to the face, that is, to a simple appearance (and all this happens with great frequency). And the whole tragedy lies in the fact that for Nastasya Filippovna "... becoming is more important than being" (as Paul Klee said about his painting). Becoming is here synonymous with a change that ends in death, a change of face and face, punctum and non-punctum, and in the final analysis this insoluble becoming is a becoming towards death, if only the passion for being in this or that form (but only one) did not prevail.

1. As Bakhtin wrote, in Nastasya Filippovna there are, conflicting with each other, two goals from a - a goal from Myshkin and Rogozhin - and this is reflected in her behavior. When Rogozhin's voice wins, she is frantic and wants to lose herself in a whirlwind of festivities and in a carnival of hundreds of indifferent cold faces. Body and face without clearly defined features, they are amorphous, and waves of indifference roll over them. Dionysian revelry, which Nietzsche loved so much, is to kill himself and at the same time kill his shame and disgrace, which presses and reminds of himself so much that he cannot be forgotten and hidden. But Myshkin's voice eliminates the element of rebellion, this intentional deadly game. This voice stops the convulsions of the body and offers Humility expressed in countenance. Nastasya Filippovna calms down. In the movements - a guilty slowness: and what, by its circumference and position, is called a face, is now a face that has acted for a while.

“When she comes to Ganya’s apartment, where, as she knows, she is being condemned, she spitefully plays the role of a cocotte, and only Myshkin’s voice, intersecting with her internal dialogue in a different direction, makes her abruptly change this tone and respectfully kiss the hand of Ganya’s mother, which she had just mocked."

Rogozhin is a symbol of her fall, Myshkin is a symbol of her purity. But these symbols existed long before the appearance of their representatives. The strangeness and metaphysicality is that the symbols have found their heroes, that the heroes have found their symbols. Voices that belong inside game spirit, correspond to the face and face, being embodied physiognomically and metaphysically. And only the mask does not apply to either one or the other, it obviously belongs to death, and memories of past changes slowly disappear in it.

Myshkin peers at Nastasya Filippovna, as people peer at an icon. Rogozhin sees in her an erotic beauty, the possession of which for him is the height of bliss. - Beauty that is up for auction, beauty that is easy to buy and just as easy to hate if it belongs to someone else. The icon is not worth it, but it can be possessed if you sincerely let it into yourself and give away the most intimate - love and compassion for the Saint. The icon is a frozen, strangely suffering beauty of the face (this is how the prince sees Nastasya Filippovna). And an erotic picture always follows the law

overcoming herself - (cinema) - she must be in motion in order to show bodily, but not spiritual beauty (this is what Nastasya Filippovna Rogozhin sees).

Even in the very appearance of Rogozhin and Myshkin, their voices are drawn. The facial features of one of them correspond to the look directed at the surface, the other - to the look penetrating the depth. Rogozhin's face captivates with its contrast and delineation: "... curly-haired and almost black-haired, with gray, small, but fiery eyes ... a cheeky face, thin lips constantly folded into some kind of arrogant, mocking and even malicious smile." Myshkin's face, on the contrary, does not detain someone else's gaze on itself and, as it were, easily, without obstacles, passes it deep into, and even it itself draws sketches of the inner world. The face is pale and inanimate, light, transparent and undefined: “... very blond, thick-haired, with sunken cheeks and with a light, pointed, almost completely white beard. His eyes were large, blue and intent… his face was… thin and dry, but colorless.”

2. When two voices meet outside of consciousness another, there is a short circuit of meaning. The whole story in the novel begins with the meeting of Myshkin and Rogozhin and ends with just the two of them. It was as if two voices were going metaphysically to the consciousness of Nastasya Filippovna, embodied in it, and then left it.

“How did you know it was me? Where have you seen me before? What is it, in fact, I seem to have seen him somewhere? ..

I also seemed to see you somewhere ... I definitely saw your eyes somewhere ... Maybe in a dream ... ”

Bakhtin's voices also exist outside of consciousness (which is the most important thing) and come into contact in a strange space of visions and reality and cannot get rid of their predestination in any way. And all attempts to try on are shattered by the somnambulistic logic of actions, which cannot be avoided in any way.

Two voices, competing with each other in the consciousness and outside the consciousness of Nastasya Filippovna, gradually approach each other (exchange of crosses). This paradox smells of death; the endless change of face and face eventually merges them together, thereby connecting and destroying voices. The death of Nastasya Filippovna is not just a physiognomic and bodily death, but it is also the death of two opposing voices. Spatial distance is not

exists, happened confluence- what could Nastasya Filippovna be afraid of if she knew about such a danger, as Aglaya knew about fear withdrawals.

Dostoevsky gradually increases the synchronicity in the behavior of Rogozhin and Myshkin, and at the end of the novel they walk together different sides streets, approaching the house in which the murdered Nastasya Filippovna lies. Up there, they are already too much are close and synchronous - in identical poses they touch each other with their knees, and then they completely lie down next to each other.

Parfen Rogozhin, apparently, acquired a voice, he was not born with it, acquired it gradually, in the struggle between mother and father - the influence of the latter turned out to be decisive. Having lost this voice and the somnambulistic predestination associated with it, Rogozhin remained out of his mind, that is, he went crazy. Thus, he became even more like Myshkin - complete confluence, - whose voice was innate and truly one with him, and that is why everyone, not knowing this, called him idiot, which is probably equal to blessed and holy fool.

Essentially, Rogozhin and Myshkin are at the limit of their consciousness; and about both, you can say that he is crazy. However, the world of Rogozhin, in which his retinue, the retinue of Nastasya Filippovna and he himself, operates, is similar to nightmare, which only the prince is able to see. The rapprochement of Myshkin and Rogozhin and, accordingly, the change in the face and face of Nastasya Filippovna, occurs through parting, separation. This rapprochement has an ever closer character, in which the difference is felt more and more. Fraternization and the exchange of crosses - an act of true holiness is erased in the house of grave evil. The meek Christian soul of the mother is broken against the merchant spirit of Rogozhin and his father. And at the same time parting than closer to the end, the more narrow-minded: Rogozhin prefers not to let the prince go beyond his visibility. Hence peeping and surveillance as an obsession.

When Nastasya Filippovna was already dead, when the face and face merged into one memory mask, the voices also became only memories of the bodies.

Heads, after the death of their owner, joining together, like a face and a face, are erased and turn into only bodies, or rather, they leave behind only bodies that have neither special insight nor hope, and ultimately have only nothing but capable of it nothing to see how the condemned man sees him death penalty offender who lost close friend associated with it by metaphysical ties.

Space-not-time

1. Space lost time, because the whole novel is to some extent a dialogue of characters, the novel itself is a polyphonic dialogue (Bakhtin). And just as a person absorbed in conversation forgets about time, gets lost in it, so here: time does not exist. Time as something obvious and obvious, like morning, evening, day, and as something lasting: years, months, gray hair, memories - does not make sense. There is only space, an endless space of conversation, furnished rooms and strange dreams/visions. And time is lost somewhere, as if everyone has forgotten about it, as if time is not felt behind the conversation of the characters. If there is a word "morning" or "for a long time", then this is only a sign of writing, while space owns everything - voice, thoughts, mind. At this lost time there is no true past (everything that is retold and remembered has happened and continues at the same time) and future (it makes no sense to schedule a wedding with Nastasya Filippovna on a certain day - it will never happen). Time is lost and compressed - nothing is carried out, only conversation / space something moves.

“My life, my life - sometimes I speak of it as something that has already happened, sometimes as a joke that continues to make you laugh, but it is neither one nor the other, because it has happened and continues at the same time; is there a time in grammar to express it? The clock that the master wound up and buried before he died; someday their spinning wheels will tell the worms about God.”

Rogozhin's house, similar, as Ippolit noted, to a cemetery, is last resort Nastasya Filippovna: questions about God are asked here, because it is here that He does not exist. In Rogozhin's house there is a whole gallery of paintings and in the same place - a whole gallery of small cells in which someone lives, or rather, someone dies. Parfen Rogozhin's room is dark, with heavy furniture, a bureau, cabinets in which business papers are stored. On the wall is a huge portrait of his father. One gets the impression that his corpse is somewhere here, in this room, and that, according to custom, everyone left it, as it was with the deceased - and therefore this space is dead. It is not just dead, but as if walled up and hermetically sealed. Family crypt. Embodiment

fear, unconscious fear that there will be no more time, that only space without time will remain, for the present that lasts is the timelessness of time.

"Now he has nothing but the present - in the form of a hermetically sealed room from which any idea of ​​space and time, any divine, human, animal or material image has disappeared."

The divine image has indeed been erased, and only remotely reminds of God very the human corpse of Christ. Near this picture of Holbein the Younger, Rogozhin asks Myshkin a question about faith in God. Here, in the tension of the question and the hopelessness of the answer, Myshkin's metaphysical voice receives an incurable wound, which, like the fraternization of crosses, will unite Myshkin and Rogozhin into a kind of not-good-not-evil-mass, bringing to Nastasya Filippovna the emptiness of death.

The naked living body seduces. The dead is terrifying precisely because it is no longer alive, but it is, however, not devoid of memories of its life, and nakedness constitutes a certain secret of pure desire. However, there are cases when the body disappears as a memory, as connected with us, as containing mystery and spirit. It's a hollow body, a wounded body. Jesus Christ in Holbein's painting is exactly like this - the body of Christ is not only a hollow body, a body not only without organs (Artaud), but also without a soul. Stigmata are no longer an allegory of sacrifice, they are pure wounds that destroy the cover of the body, creating holes of various shapes. Also the mouth, the mouth of a drowned man is a big wound, a rounded hole. These holes are exits for the soul, which, like the heroes of Homer, flies out through wounds and an open mouth, and it is no longer spilled over the body and does not hide in the organs. The body is like a dead blue vessel filled with emptiness.

The paintings on the walls are oily, smoky, in dull gilded frames. Portrait of Father Rogozhin - yellow wrinkled face. In the corridor are portraits of bishops and landscapes that are almost indistinguishable. Semi-darkness and smokyness erase these pictures, which merge with dirty walls. The gradual destruction of the image is the embodiment of death, which finds its highest expression in Holbein's painting, where, on the contrary, the action of death is visual and not covered by the aging of the canvas. We see the work of death, and that is enough - in such a body the spirit dies.

All the pictures seem to be fraught with what people call death. The paintings are symbolically similar to those images that represent the deceased and are fixed on the tombstone. And even landscapes signify something - perhaps someone's memory is dying behind the wall, an indifferent memory.

2. The episode of Rogozhin's persecution of Prince Myshkin depicts a space suspended and isolated from reality. There is no nature, no landscape, no logic, no sky, no natural light in this station square. But there are lines of perspective. - A picture that is given through the memories of the prince: he stood at the bench and looked at the object that interested him (the knife interested him, because he annoyingly caught his eye in Rogozhin's house). This shop in his memory seems to be suspended, and the lines of perspective (which are visible just as lines) converge between the transparent top and bottom. Around objects-ghosts in airless space. A surreal picture drawn in an epileptic state. Myshkin experiences sensations that are akin to the sensations of a person sentenced to death a few minutes before the execution of the sentence. The prince often thinks about this and tries to comprehend the state of other people in a similar situation. For this reason he draws a painting in the style of Hans Fries “The Beheading of John the Baptist” (1514), telling the plot of the canvas to Adelaide: “... draw the face of the condemned a second before the guillotine strikes, when he is still standing on the scaffold, before lying down on this board.” One pale face and a cross. Try to express in the face all the horror and the stretched out moment before nothing. This has much in common with the episode I described at the shop and other scenes that flared up during the prince's epileptic seizures.

“He thought, among other things, about the fact that in his epileptic state there was one degree almost before the seizure (if only the seizure came in reality), when suddenly, in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness, pressure, his brain seemed to ignite for moments, and with all his vital forces were strained with an unusual impulse. The feeling of life, self-consciousness almost multiplied tenfold ... "

This state is akin to the one felt by the condemned before death and which Myshkin described to the Yepanchin family. Both here and there the prince describes in words (or through the author) the picture that appears to him at the moment when “the extraordinary word becomes clear that there will be no more time».

It is the feeling of the absence of time, which, although to a different extent, comes through in the description of Rogozhin's house, highlights and reveals the signs of space. The space is now presented too sharply, metaphysically clear: it can be walls that seem to be drilled through and perceived differently (Rogozhin's house); it may be a field covered with a transcendent haze (visions of the prince). Over Dostoevsky's character, which looks like a kind of nerve without skin, closes its dreamlike or quite real-dirty vise of space-no-time. The character resides in this space-no-time with an almost hysterical silence or a hysterical cry (it's not for nothing that Dostoevsky laughs so hysterically like a child, just like Kafka claps a lot). This hysteria in Myshkin and Rogozhin, expressed in various forms, is never confined to the body, but passes to Nastasya Filippovna or is glued onto the surrounding space, which acquires hysterical features, in other words, it is subjectivized, like a human nerve, spread out everywhere.

Dostoevsky is extremely polyphonic, his ideas are built on the dialectic of good and evil. He does not even think about theodicy. Dostoevsky's letter is an insight drawn from transcendental experience, which, however, does not reject real experience. In the novel The Idiot, each character is amorphous, aimless, changeable in the direction of good and evil, he not valid, in the sense that his actions are meaningless and aimless. This novel is like a memory in delirium. Some faces are more distinct, others, having flashed several times, are no longer seen. And the voice, probably the voice of the patient who remembers this, somewhat changed in its pitch, rolls over the faces of the characters, being recognized as their inner or outer voice, and then again disappears from the world of characters. This polyphony is actually a huge, all-encompassing soundtrack, the sounds of which are echoed or not echoed by the lips of the characters. You can see how they catch the voice in their mouths, which penetrates into them, which wanders in their body, and then comes out, gathering spirit/ along with the spirit, through the oral cavity, being realized as their own thought, expressed in the word. But this voice, despite the fact that it penetrates the characters, is external, it is not endowed with the meaning of the otherworldly and easily dies, dissolving in the word.

But there are other voices that no one catches, that cannot be caught, and which, going outward, do not die at all, but last, continuing to live. These are inner voices, voices of the spirit, which are not come out with spirit, but they are replicated, or rather, stretched outward, extending their invisible thread in friend. In the imagination of the transcendent patient, the characters endowed with these voices receive a disturbing note, a dramatic openness, and the repetition of pain. These characters are Prince Myshkin, Parfen Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna. These voices seem to exist outside of someone's thought, they are immanent in themselves, they are transcendent and too independent. When opposing voices merge, when thereby good and evil become one element, the voices are erased, and the one in whom they dwelt also dies. Beauty does not save the world, it dies in the world, like a mirror that is never distorted, but which is distorted. That which should save itself needs help, in order to later, only later, revive the world. Myshkin wants to save Nastasya Filippovna so that she can save the world, while Rogozhin wants to save her for himself so that she can save him.

The face exists as an intimacy, expressing in the mirror what others want to see. The face is for everyone, in it abstract concepts take on life, be it Good, Beauty, Holiness, and they see in it what they should see, what spiritually revives a person. Combining face and face together, a one-time connection is death, a failure into nothingness, like the dead Christ in Holbein, in which the portrait and spiritual features are erased, who keeps only the memory of his past outlines and the emptiness of what has happened.

Apparently, dead beauty is the symbol of the restrained fall. Paradoxically, the postulate turns over - dead beauty asks the world a question, but does not answer it. In order to save, it turned out to be necessary to exhaust, to devastate. Now in Nastasya Filippovna there is neither good nor evil, but only pure beauty, beauty as it is. Not to save the world, but to save the one who has to save the world: it is still so far from absolute salvation. Ultimately, only the symbol of salvation can be saved - Beauty, meaning without a living body.

Not Dobro has a permanent residence permit - Rogozhin has a house. Good is a journey, it is Don Quixote, who, as a sign of writing read novels, tries to stick these novels on the world. Prince Myshkin is also homeless. He is the Don Quixote of his voice. And like Don Quixote, who compares the world with chivalric romances, Myshkin acts according to books called the Bible.

“... Don Quixote must give reality to the signs of the story, devoid of content. His fate should be the key to the world: the meaning of this fate is a meticulous search all over the face of the earth for those figures who would prove that the books tell the truth.

Isn't this the fate of Myshkin - the eternal search for the good, the endless proof that Christian truths are in full agreement with real things. However, his fate did not unravel the world at all, because it did not reach the answer, his fate was simply empty because it did not prove anything, except that death has power over everything, that death is not the identity of a book and reality, death is something else. , this is neither evil nor good, for both are a manifestation of life, death is the end, nothing, devastation in the void, this is a stone mask, unseeing, closed eyes. His destiny dissolved the boundaries and emptied itself. She proved only that the beginning of a new life that will answer main question about salvation, - in death (pass through death).

Don Quixote died at the end of the first book, but was reborn in the second, reborn as a book, as its personification, and acquired a power that he did not have before his death. Prince Myshkin did not die, but he lost his voice, which he will never find. Myshkin is entirely focused on the similarity, it is not given to him to understand the differences, in everyone he sees only the similarity with the good, with what is main theme The book he represents. Myshkin must prove that the Bible speaks the truth, that it really is the language of the world, that goodness is the language of the world. But his voice merges with evil, looking for good in evil, enters into it too much and, in the end, not knowing it, gets to the essence of identity. This is the identity of good and evil in Nastasya Filippovna, absolute identity, deadly unity. She dies physiognomically: face and face, merging, turn into a mask; and dies physically: the body of Nastasya Filippovna is pierced with a garden knife, she is put to death by Rogozhin and killed by the prince's foresight.

Nothing explains the idea of ​​the novel better than hypochondria and a certain anti-puppetry of figures who are able to forget their previous deeds and break the threads connecting them with a rational beginning. New and new layers of images on the depicted (photographs, portraits, visions on what is described as reality) create a hyperimage, a multi-layered layer of accelerated, slow movements, repeated poses in the photo, enlarged impressions

on portraits, images of murdered symbols (Holbein's Christ), surrealistic states fixed in the space of renaissance experiments with perspective (visions of the prince). All descriptions grow into the sphere of the image, pass through it and exchange particles of themselves with it, gradually slowing down. Everything eventually freezes and is exhausted.

In Dostoevsky's novel everything goes to static, to exhaustion, to devastation, to a gradual subsidence, to a denouement. The hermeneutic code, the code of time tightening, dragged out time to infinity, blew it up from the inside, crushed it to invisible particles and to some extent dissolved it in space: the closer to the end, the slower the actions, the more synchronous they are (they are layered on top of each other by double exposure ), the more meditative space, space-not-time. The voices of Myshkin and Rogozhin died with Nastasya Filippovna; Myshkin and Rogozhin weightless, they are in a closed vessel, as if in the hollow body of Holbein's Christ, this is probably the degree of their emptiness. The space in the last lines of the novel is suspended and cleared of the weight of real things, it seems to be reduced to reverence for the pure symbol of Beauty, which will save, someday will save the world. This beautiful dead body is closed from the world by curtains, and no one, not even the world itself, sees the action of death. This is pure Beauty, a symbol of beauty will never get to one person, because it belongs to the world and will belong to the world, but not as a bodily, tangible form, but as a Spiritual sphere, to kill which already impossible. The death of Nastasya Filippovna is both a sacrifice and a liberation. Even the dead body of Nastasya Filippovna is beautiful, it is stopped and fixed in its beauty. The body and beauty are self-contained, like a pure symbol that exhausts life.

Images and what is depicted in the novel look like super-reality and at the same time like quasi-reality. The world is seen only through the senses, through the subjective organs. The appearance of the characters opens or closes the way inward. The reality described in the novel is a paroxysm, a clinical trial of the space in which extremely polyphonic actions unfold, which are permitted (exhausted/erased) only inner voice prince. Objective, subjective and optical world exist too much beside. One of important topics the novel is the destruction of boundaries: between evil and good, the objective world and the optical world, between bodies, and inside bodies - between face and face; between past and future, inner and outer voices,

life and death... Destroying boundaries to achieve tabula rasa: erasing for a clean surface, zeroed and de-energized. Actually, Prince Myshkin is the seer who is not aware of the real differences and boundaries, erases them with his boundless vision. Many characters for him are children, evil is part of goodness, visions are merged with reality. Myshkin's metaphysical voice achieves infinite inversion and identity in Nastasya Filipovna, who is already pure beauty - pulchritudo rasa. From pure beauty will begin the salvation of the world.

The whole novel is filled with deep symbolic content. In every plot, in the image of every hero, Dostoevsky strives to put one or another hidden meaning. Nastasya Filippovna symbolizes beauty, and Myshkin symbolizes Christian grace and the ability for forgiveness and humility. The main idea is to contrast perfect image righteous Myshkin and the cruel surrounding world of Russian reality, human meanness and meanness. It is precisely because of the deep disbelief of people, their lack of moral and spiritual values ​​that we see tragic ending with which Dostoevsky ends his novel.

Analysis of the work

History of creation

The novel was first published in 1868 on the pages of the Russky Vestnik magazine. The idea of ​​the work was born by Dostoevsky after the publication of "Crime and Punishment" during a trip to Germany and Switzerland. In the same place, on September 14, 1867, he made the first entry regarding the future novel. Further, he went to Italy, and in Florence the novel was completed completely. Dostoevsky said that after working on the image of Raskolnikov, he wanted to bring to life a different, completely ideal image.

Features of the plot and composition

The main feature of the composition of the novel is an overly drawn-out climax, which gets its denouement only in the penultimate chapter. The novel itself is divided into four parts, each of which, according to the chronology of events, smoothly flows into another.

The principles of the plot and composition are based on the centralization of the image of Prince Myshkin, all events unfold around him and parallel lines novel.

Images of the main characters

The main thing actor- Prince Myshkin is an example of the embodiment of universal goodness and mercy, he is a blessed person, completely devoid of any kind of shortcomings, like envy or malice. Outwardly, he has an unattractive appearance, awkward and constantly causes ridicule of others. In his image, Dostoevsky puts the great idea that it doesn’t matter what a person looks like, only the purity of his thoughts and the righteousness of his actions are important. Myshkin infinitely loves all the people around him, is extremely disinterested and open-hearted. It is for this that he is called the “Idiot”, because people who are used to being in a world of constant lies, the power of money and debauchery absolutely do not understand his behavior, consider him sick and insane. The prince, meanwhile, is trying to help everyone, seeking to heal other people's spiritual wounds with his kindness and sincerity. Dostoevsky idealizes his image, even equating him with Jesus. By "killing" the hero at the end, he makes it clear to the reader that, like Christ, Myshkin has forgiven all his offenders.

Nastasya Filippovna - another symbolic image. An exceptionally beautiful woman who is able to hit any man in the heart, with insanely tragic fate. Being an innocent girl, she was molested by her guardian and this overshadowed her whole future life. Since then, she has despised everything, both people and life itself. Its entire existence is directed towards deep self-destruction and self-destruction. Men trade her like a thing, she only contemptuously observes this, supporting this game. Dostoevsky himself does not give a clear understanding of the inner world of this woman; we learn about her from the lips of other people. Her soul remains closed to everyone, including the reader. She is a symbol of eternally elusive beauty, which in the end never got to anyone.

Conclusion

Dostoevsky admitted more than once that The Idiot is one of his favorite and most successful works. Indeed, there are few other books in his work that have managed to express him so accurately and fully. moral position and philosophical point of view. The novel survived many adaptations, was repeatedly staged in the form of performances and operas, and received well-deserved recognition from domestic and foreign literary critics.

In his novel, the author makes us think about the fact that his "idiot" is the most happy man in the world, because he is able to sincerely love, enjoys every day and perceives everything that happens to him as an exceptional blessing. This is his great superiority over the rest of the characters in the novel.

The first reviews of the novel reached F. M. Dostoevsky even before the end of The Idiot from his St. Petersburg correspondents. After the publication of the January issue of the journal with the initial seven chapters, in response to F. M. Dostoevsky's excited confession in a letter dated February 18 (March 1), 1868, that he himself could not express anything "to himself" and needed "truth", craves "review". A. N. Maikov wrote: "... I have to tell you very pleasant news: success. Excited curiosity, interest in many personally experienced terrible moments, an original task in the hero<...>The general's wife, the promise of something strong in Nastasya Filippovna, and much, much - stopped the attention of everyone with whom I spoke ... "Further, A. N. Maikov refers to mutual acquaintances - the writer and literary historian A. P. Milyukov , economist E. I. Lamansky, as well as critic N. I. Solovyov, who asked to convey "his sincere delight from" The Idiot "" and testified that he "saw a strong impression on many" 2, 65, 66--67 .

However, in connection with the appearance in the February book of the "Russian Messenger" of the end of the first part, A. N. Maikov in a letter dated March 14, 1868, defining artistic originality novel, shaded his critical attitude to the "fantastic" coverage of persons and events in it: "... the impression is this: an awful lot of power, brilliant lightning (for example<имер>when the Idiot was slapped and what he said, and various others), but in the whole action there is more possibility and plausibility than truth. The most, if you like, real face is the Idiot (does that seem strange to you?), while the rest all seem to live in a fantasy world, for all, though strong, definitive, but fantastic, some kind of exceptional brilliance. It is read voraciously, and at the same time - it is not believed. "Crime<ение>and order<ание>"on the contrary, it sort of clarifies life, after it you seem to see more clearly in life<...>But how much power! how many wonderful places! How good is The Idiot! Yes, and all the faces are very bright, colorful - only illuminated by an electric fire, in which the most ordinary, familiar face, ordinary colors - receive a supernatural brilliance, and one wants to look at them anew.<...>In the novel, lighting, as in " last day Pompeii": both good and curious (curious to the extreme, enticing), and wonderful!" Agreeing that this “judgment may be very true,” F. M. Dostoevsky, in a response letter dated March 21-22 (April 2-3), 1868, raised a number of objections: he pointed out that “many gizmos at the end of the 1st part are taken from nature, and some characters are simply portraits. He especially defended "the perfect fidelity of Nastasya Filippovna's character." And in a letter to S. A. Ivanova dated March 29 (April 10), 1868, the author noted that the idea of ​​"The Idiot" is "one of those that do not take effect, but essence."

The first two chapters of the second part (Myshkin in Moscow, rumors about him, his letter to Aglaya, return and visit to Lebedev) were met by A. N. Maikov very sympathetically: he saw in them "the skill of a great artist<...>in drawing even silhouettes, but full of character" there. In a later letter dated September 30 of the old style (when the entire second part and the beginning of the third had already been printed), A. N. Maikov, arguing that the idea he "sees through" is "magnificent", on behalf of readers repeated his "main reproach in the fantasticness of faces " 3, 351, 353 .

Statements about the novel by H. H. Strakhov underwent a similar evolution. In a letter dated mid-March 1868, he approved the idea: "What a wonderful idea! Wisdom, open to the infant soul and inaccessible to the wise and prudent - this is how I understood your task. You are in vain afraid of lethargy; it seems to me "Your manner has finally been established, and in this respect I did not find any defect in the first part of The Idiot" 4, 73 . Having become acquainted with the continuation of the novel, with the exception of four recent chapters, N. N. Strakhov promised F. M. Dostoevsky to write an article about "The Idiot", which he read "with greed and the greatest attention" (letter dated January 31, 1869) 5, 258-259 . However, he did not fulfill his intention. F. M. Dostoevsky read an indirect reproach to himself as the author of The Idiot in an article by N. N. Strakhov published in the January issue of Zarya, in which War and Peace was opposed to works with "intricate and mysterious adventures", "descriptions of dirty and terrible scenes", "depicting terrible mental anguish" 5, 262 .

Two years later, N. N. Strakhov, again returning to the comparison of L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, directly and categorically recognized The Idiot as a failure of the writer. “Obviously, in terms of content, abundance and variety of ideas,” he wrote to F. M. Dostoevsky on February 22, old style, 1871, “you are our first person, and L. N. Tolstoy himself is monotonous compared to you. This is not contradicted by the fact that everything of yours has a special and sharp coloring, but it is obvious: you write for the most part for a select audience, and you clutter up your works, complicate them too much. If the fabric of your stories were simpler, they would be stronger. For example, "Player", "Eternal Husband" made the clearest impression, and everything that you invested in "Idiot" was wasted. This disadvantage, of course, is in connection with your merits.<...>And the whole secret, it seems to me, lies in weakening creativity, lowering the subtlety of analysis, instead of twenty images and hundreds of scenes, stop at one image and a dozen scenes. Sorry<...>I feel like I'm touching great mystery that I offer you the most ridiculous advice to stop being yourself, stop being Dostoevsky" 5, 271 .

The writer himself agreed with some of these remarks. Having finished the novel, he was not satisfied with it, believed that "he did not express even a 10th share of what<...>I wanted to express, "although all the same," he admitted to S. A. Ivanova in a letter dated January 25 (February 6), 1869, "I do not deny him and still love my failed idea."

At the same time, reflecting on the requirements presented to him and correlating The Idiot with contemporary literature, F. M. Dostoevsky clearly realized distinctive features his manner and rejected recommendations that would prevent him from "being himself." On December 11 (23), 1868, F. M. Dostoevsky wrote to A. N. Maikov: "I have completely different ideas about reality and realism than our realists and critics." Claiming that his "idealism" is more real than "theirs" realism, the writer noticed that if he were to "tell" about what "all of us, Russians, have experienced in the last 10 years in our spiritual development", "realist" critics, accustomed to depicting only one firmly established and well-formed, "scream that this is a fantasy!", While this is exactly what, in his opinion, is "primordial, real realism!" they face the task of creating an image of "positively beautiful person"The hero of A. N. Ostrovsky, Lyubim Tortsov, seemed to him pale and insignificant, embodying, according to the author of The Idiot in the same letter, "everything that their realism allowed itself to be ideal." Responding in a letter to N. N. Strakhov dated 26 On February 10 (March 10), 1869, on his article about L. N. Tolstoy and "eagerly" waiting for his "opinion" on "The Idiot", F. M. Dostoevsky emphasized: "I have my own special view of reality (in art ), and what most people call almost fantastic and exceptional, sometimes for me is the very essence of the real. Ordinary phenomena and official view of them, in my opinion, is not yet realism, but even the opposite." "is not reality, and even the most ordinary! Yes, it is precisely now that there should be such characters in our strata of society cut off from the earth, strata that in reality are becoming fantastic. But there is nothing to say! In the novel, much has been written hastily, much stretched out and failed, but something did succeed. I am not for the novel, but I stand for my idea.

Of the early epistolary responses, F. M. Dostoevsky could be most pleased with the message about the interest in The Idiot aroused by the reading public after the appearance of the first part of his old acquaintance Dr. S. D. Yanovsky, who wrote from Moscow on April 12, old style, 1868, about that "the whole mass, of course, everyone is delighted!" and "everywhere", "in the club, in small salons, in carriages on railway", they only talk about latest novel F. M. Dostoevsky, from whom, according to the statements, "you just can't tear yourself away until the last page." S. D. Yanovsky himself fell in love with Myshkin’s personality “as you love only yourself”, and in the story of Marie, the story about the plot of the painting “from one head” of the sentenced, the scene of unraveling the characters of the sisters, he saw the “triumph of talent” by F. M. Dostoevsky 3, 375 - 376 .

The success of The Idiot with readers is also evidenced by newspaper reviews of the first part of the novel. The correspondent of "Golos" in the review "Bibliography and Journalism" announced that "The Idiot" "promises to be more interesting than the novel"Crime and Punishment"<...>, although it suffers from the same shortcomings - some protractedness and frequent repetitions of one and the same spiritual movement", and interprets the image of Prince Myshkin as a "type", which "is found in such a wide scale, perhaps for the first time again in our literature", but in life represents "far from news": society often "stigmatizes" such people " shameful name of fools and idiots", but they "in the merits of the mind and heart are incomparably higher than their true detractors" 6, 27 .

Compiler of the Chronicle public life"in the" Exchange Gazette" he singled out "The Idiot" as a work that "leaves behind everything that appeared this year in other magazines in terms of fiction", and noting the depth and "perfection" of psychological analysis in the novel, emphasized the inner relationship of the central character and its creator. "Each word, every movement of the hero of the novel, Prince Myshkin," he wrote, "is not only strictly thought out and deeply felt by the author, but also, as it were, experienced by him." 7, 26 .

According to the definition of the reviewer of The Russian Disabled Man, it is “hard to guess” what the author will do with Myshkin, “an adult child”, “this original person, how vividly he will be able to compare the artificiality of our life with direct nature, but already now we can say that the novel will read with great interest. The intrigue is tied up unusually skillfully, the presentation is beautiful, not even suffering from lengthiness, so common in the works of Dostoevsky " 8, 23 .

The most detailed and serious analysis of the first part of the novel was given in the article "Letters on Russian journalism. "Idiot". A novel by F. M. Dostoevsky", placed in the "Kharkovskie Gubernskie Vedomosti", signed "K". "Letters" began with a reminder of the "remarkably humane" attitude of F. M. Dostoevsky to "humiliated and insulted personalities" and his ability "to correctly grasp the moment of the highest shock of the human soul and generally follow the gradual development of its movements" as about those qualities of his gifts and traits literary direction that led to the Idiot. The outlines of the novel's construction were characterized in the article as follows: "... before the reader passes a number of really living people, faithful to the soil on which they grew up, to the environment in which their moral world was formed, and, moreover, the faces of more than one circle , but the most diverse social positions and degrees of mental and moral development, sympathetic people and those in which it is difficult to notice even the slightest remnants of the human image, and finally, unfortunate people, whom the author is especially good at portraying<...>. In the circle of life into which the author throws his hero, no attention is paid to the idiot; when, in a collision with him, the personality of the hero expresses itself in all its moral beauty, the impression it leaves is so strong that restraint and mask fall off the characters and their moral world is sharply indicated. Around the hero and with a strong participation on his part, a course of events full of drama develops. "In conclusion, the reviewer suggested that ideological sense novel. "It is difficult to judge from just one part of the novel what the author intended to make of his work, but his novel is obviously conceived broadly, at least this type of infantile impractical person, but with all the charm of truth and moral purity, on such a large scale for the first time is in our literature" 9, 19 .

A negative assessment of "Idiot" was given by V. P. Burenin in three articles from the "Journalism" cycle, signed with the pseudonym "Z", which appeared in "S.-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti" during the publication of the first and second parts of the novel. Finding that F. M. Dostoevsky makes his hero and the people around him "anomalies among ordinary people", as a result of which the narrative "has the character of some phantasmagoria", V. P. Burenin ironically remarked: "The novel could be not only an "Idiot" name, but even "Idiots", there would be no mistake in such a name. In the final third article, he put an equal sign between the depiction of Myshkin's state of mind and the medical description of the condition of a sick person and did not find in The Idiot any connection with the real soil and public affairs, regarded it as a "fictional compilation, composed of a multitude of persons and events, without any concern for any artistic task" 10, 15, 21, 22 .

Later, in 1876, V. P. Burenin partially revised his previous assessment of F. M. Dostoevsky in his " Literary essays", having come to the conclusion that the "psychiatric artistic studies" of F. M. Dostoevsky have "full justification" in Russian life, recently freed from serfdom, "the main and most terrible of those levers that tilted its human system towards any lack of rights and debauchery, both moral and social". But "Idiot" (along with "White Nights") V. P. Burenin still attributed to the exceptions leading to the "field of pathology" 11, 10 .

Less categorical was the condemnation of the novel in an anonymous review of the Evening Newspaper published in January 1869, which, as established, belongs to N. S. Leskov 12, 224 - 229 . Considering, like V.P. Burenin and many other representatives of the then critics who judged psychological system novelist with an alien aesthetic position that the protagonists of the novel "everyone, as if by choice, are obsessed mental illness", N. S. Leskov nevertheless sought to understand the original thought, which he was guided by.

F. M. Dostoevsky in the description of the character of the central character. “The protagonist of the novel, Prince Myshkin, is an idiot, as many call him,” wrote N. S. Leskov, “a man who is extremely abnormally developed spiritually, a man with a painfully developed reflection, who has two extremes, naive spontaneity and deep psychological analysis, merged together, do not contradict each other; this is the reason that many consider him an idiot, which, however, he was in his childhood. The article by N. S. Leskov was the last critical response that appeared before the publication of the final (fifth to twelfth) chapters of the fourth part. After the completion of the printing of The Idiot, F. M. Dostoevsky naturally expected a more comprehensive and detailed analysis of the novel. But such a generalized response did not follow. In general, over the next two years, not a single article or review appeared about the novel, which greatly upset the writer, affirming him in the thought of the “failure” of The Idiot. The reason for the silence lay partly in the inconsistency of the ideological sound of the novel, the humanistic pathos of which was intricately combined with the criticism of "modern nihilists": the struggle of ideas depicted in it did not receive a resolution that would completely satisfy reviewers of both the conservative or liberal and democratic camps. On the other hand, the then criticism was not yet sufficiently prepared for the perception of the aesthetic innovation of F. M. Dostoevsky, in art system which the role of "fantastic", "exceptional" elements of real life acted so sharply. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin managed to penetrate most deeply into the idea of ​​the novel and to fully appreciate its significance during the life of F. M. Dostoevsky. Despite the difference in socio-political positions and the controversy that continued even on the pages of the novel, the great satirist left a significant review of The Idiot, in which he astutely described both the weak and strong sides of F. M. Dostoevsky's talent, which was close in some of its features to his stock. own talent. In a review devoted to Omulevsky's novel "Step by Step" and published in the April issue of Notes of the Fatherland for 1871, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, analyzing the state of Russian literature of those years, singled out F. M. Dostoevsky and emphasized that "by the depth of the idea, by the breadth of the tasks moral peace developed by him, this writer stands completely apart from us" and "not only recognizes the legitimacy of those interests that concern modern society, but even goes further, enters the realm of foresights and forebodings, which are the goal of not the immediate, but the most distant searches of mankind." As a convincing illustration of this thesis of his, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin pointed to an attempt to portray the type of person who has achieved complete moral and spiritual balance, which is the basis of the novel The Idiot. human spirit to come to balance and harmony "exists continuously, "passes from one generation to another, filling the content of history", M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, in F.M. Dostoevsky's intention to create the image of a with which all sorts of questions about women's work, about the distribution of values, about freedom of thought, etc., pale, as this is "the ultimate goal, in view of which even the most radical solutions to all other questions of interest to society seem to be only intermediate stations." At the same time, the passionate protest of the satirist-democrat was caused by F. M. Dostoevsky’s “mockery” “over the so-called nihilism and contempt for confusion, the reasons for which are always left unexplained.” Noting the features of not only proximity, but also the divergence of the ideals of F. M. Dostoevsky with the advanced part of Russian society, its views on the way to achieve future universal "harmony", M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: "So what? - despite the radiance of such a task, absorbing in itself all the transitional forms of progress, Dostoevsky, not in the least embarrassed, immediately undermines his own work, exposing in a shameful form people whose efforts are wholly directed in the very direction in which, apparently, , the author’s most cherished thought also rushes in. “Subsequent lifetime judgments about The Idiot, which appeared throughout the 70s either as part of articles and notes on Dostoevsky’s later works, or in general reviews of his creative path, basically systematized and developed what had already been said about novel earlier". L. N. Tolstoy gave a high assessment to the central character of the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich in the play by A. K. Tolstoy. “That’s not true, nothing like that, not in one line,” L. N. Tolstoy got excited. “Excuse me, how can you compare the Idiot with Fyodor Ivanovich, when Myshkin is a diamond, and Fyodor Ivanovich is a penny glass - he who loves diamonds is worth thousands, and no one will give two kopecks for glass” 16, 82 . But the opinions of the author of "War and Peace" about "The Idiot" as an integral work are contradictory; they show the stamp of his own creative individuality and aesthetics: the requirements for clarity of presentation, health, simplicity (see the record of V. G. Chertkov’s conversation with the writer in July 1906 and L. Tolstoy’s statements about the novel, recreated in his literary portrait by M. Gorky).

By the mid-1870s, F. M. Dostoevsky already had facts at his disposal that testified to the wide recognition that "The Idiot" received in the reader's environment. This is evidenced by a note in a notebook in 1876: “I was always supported not by criticism, but by the public. Who among the critics knows the end of The Idiot, a scene of such power that has not been repeated in literature. Well, the public knows it ... "The extent to which the idea of" The Idiot "was deeply agitated by F. M. Dostoevsky himself, and what importance he attached to the ability of others to penetrate into it, can be judged by the answer of the writer A. G. Kovner, who singled out the "Idiot" from everything created by F. M. Dostoevsky as a "masterpiece". “Imagine that I have already heard this judgment 50 times, if not more,” wrote F. M. Dostoevsky on February 14, 1877. “The book is bought every year and even more every year. That’s why I said about The Idiot now that all those who spoke to me about it as about my best work have something special in the turn of their minds, which always amazed me very much and I liked it.

COMPILATION OF THE COST AND ANALYSIS OF THE INDICATORS OF THE PUBLICATION: F.M. DOSTEVSKY "POOR PEOPLE, DOUBLE"

In the economic part of the thesis, we calculate the cost of reissuing the collection: Dostoevsky F. M. Poor People: A Novel; Double: Petersburg Poem. - M.: Sov. Russia, 1985. - 272 p.

Thanks to his realism, F. M. Dostoevsky remains relevant to this day. You can re-read it many times and always find something new, reading his works, you understand that our contemporaries can be put in the place of his heroes.

Dostoevsky F. M. reveals the most hidden corners of the human soul. Modern society largely relies on competition, struggle, lust for power, i.e. on those feelings and qualities that Dostoevsky F.M. in which people get used to the worst of sins - murder, cannot be moral and people will never feel happy in such a society.

Today's literary trend is close to the realism of F. M. Dostoevsky. Modern realism is not just descriptive, but the search for deep meanings. And therefore, the works of F. M. Dostoevsky will be reprinted many times. The classic has always been appreciated and there is a buyer for it.

Many people ask themselves the same questions that the heroes of Dostoevsky F. M. asked themselves. People living in the 21st century are faced with a choice: to accept as truth what is easiest to live with, or through suffering and mistakes, struggle and failures to break through to to that one and eternal thing that is called Truth. The ideas of Dostoevsky F.M. are especially relevant, when the distraught world is step by step approaching death, not only spiritual, but also physical. What will save the world? And is there any hope for the world to be saved? Dostoevsky answered these questions back in the 19th century: "Beauty will save the world!"

The problems posed by F. M. Dostoevsky are no less acute in our time, and perhaps even more so.

Species and typological characteristics of the publication

Type - mass edition;

According to the intended purpose - literary and artistic publication;

Reader's address - mass reader;

By the nature of information - text edition;

According to the symbolic nature of information - a text edition;

According to the composition of the main text - a collection;

According to the frequency of release - non-periodical;

According to the material construction - a book edition;

The volume is a book.

The sequence of calculating the cost and selling price of a publication

Prime cost - a set of costs for the production (output) and sale of products.

The average cost structure of publishing products, as an approximate ratio of various types of costs in their total amount, can be represented as follows:

editorial expenses - 10%;

· Expenses for printing works, paper and binding materials - 55%;

general publishing expenses - 15%;

commercial expenses - 5%;

full cost - 100%;

DS = (cost + profitability);

VAT \u003d (DS? 10) / 100%;

Profit \u003d (cost price profitability (25-30%)): 100;

Selling price = (cost + profit) + VAT (10%).

Reissue Specifications

The volume of the publication is 272 pages.

Format 84 ? 108 1/32.

Offset printing.

The circulation of the publication is 5000 copies.

Print text in one color.

Binding printing - four-color.

Illustrations - occupy 3 pages.

The size of the main text is 12 points.

Headset - "Times".

Binding - No. 7B, all-paper with a pressed film.

Offset paper No. 2B weighing 60 g/m. 2 Paper No. 2B with reduced whiteness and insufficient surface resistance to plucking. It is economically beneficial, since the circulation of the publication is average, the collection is designed for the mass reader.

Dial bar format - 6 ? 9 ? sq.

Page format - 123x192 mm.

Calculation of the cost of reprinting the collection: Dostoevsky F. M. "Poor people, Double"

The number of ordinary pages in the publication is 190.

There are 560 characters in 10 randomly selected lines of text.

The average number of characters per line is 560/10 = 56 characters.

44 lines are placed on the ordinary strip.

The number of characters on one ordinary strip: 44 56 = 2464 characters.

The number of characters on all ordinary strips: 190 2464 = 468160 characters.

The number of downhill and end lanes - 4.

Number of characters on two slips: (27 + 28) 56 = 3080 characters.

Number of characters on the two end strips: (27 + 36) 56 = 3528 characters.

The number of characters on all downhill and end lanes: 118 56 = 6608 characters.

The number of characters on the laid-out stripes: 2351 56 = 131656 characters.

The total volume of ordinary, descending and end strips and strips laid out in a section: 468160 + 6608 + 131656 = 606424 strips.

The publication is royalty-free.

Illustrations: 3 (12.3 19.2) \u003d 236.16 3 \u003d 708.48 cm. 2 \u003d 0.24 aut. sheets.

Calculation of the volume of publication in accounting and publishing sheets

Title data, title page turnover and imprint are accepted as 1000 characters.

The number of characters in the content is 132 characters.

Column numbers - 272 ? 56 = 7616 characters.

The number of characters in the afterword is 16234 characters.

Total publishing sheets in the publication: (1000 + 132 + 7616 + 16234) / 40000 + 0.24 + 15.16 = 16 publishing sheets.

Paper consumption for making a book block

The volume of the book block in physical printed sheets: 272/32= 8.5 printed sheets.

Volume in paper sheets: 8.5/2 = 4.25 paper. l.

Technical waste: 4.25 10% / 100 = 0.425 paper. l.

Number of paper sheets for circulation: 4.25 + 0.425 5000 copies. = 23375 bum. l.

The density of one paper sheet is 60 g/m. 2

Weight of one paper sheet: 84? 108/10000 60 = 54.4 g.

Mass of paper for circulation: 23375 54.4 / 1000000 = 1.27 tons.

Paper cost: 1.27 27,000 rubles. = 34290 rubles.

Cost of binding materials and endpaper

Binding paper costs.

Block thickness - 18 mm, paper roll width - 780 mm, cardboard thickness - 1.75 mm.

Paper stock size: width = (2 123) + (2 1.75) + (1 18) + 1.75 + 36 = 305.25 = 306 mm; height = 192 + (2 1.72) + 34 = 229.5 mm = 230 mm.

The width of the paper roll fits: (780 - 18) / 306 = 2 blanks.

Estimated number of meters of material per circulation: (5000/2) 230/1000 = 575 m.

The amount of material for technical waste: 5% of 575 m is 29 m.

Calculation of the total amount of material per circulation: 575 + 29 = 604 m.

The area of ​​​​the entire paper for the flight: 604 0.78 \u003d 472 m. 2

Binding paper weight 120 g/m. 2

The amount of binding paper for the entire circulation: 472 120/1000000 = 0.056 tons.

Paper costs: 0.056 30000 = 1680 rubles.

Film costs.

The film area required for one copy, taking into account bends: 2 (15.3 25.2) + (1.8 25.2) = 816.48 cm. 2

Technical waste: 816.48 0.05 = 40.82 cm. 2

Film area including technical waste: 816.48 + 40.82 = 857.3 cm2 / ind.

Dimensions of one roll of film: 70 cm 3500 cm = 245000 cm. 2 = 24.5 m. 2

Number of copies on one roll: 245,000 cm 2 / 857.3 cm 2 / copy. = 285 copies.

Number of film rolls per run: 5000/285 = 18 rolls.

The cost of a film for one-sided lamination is 16 euro rolls: 16 35 = 560 rubles.

Film costs: 18 560 = 10080 rubles.

Cardboard consumption: 5000/16 = 312.5 sheets + 3.13 (10% - technical waste) = 315.6 = 316 sheets per circulation.

Cardboard for binding: density - 185 g/m. 2; price - 28,000 rubles/ton.

Cardboard weight: 316 (84 × 108/10000 185) = 316 168.35 g = 53198.6/1000000 = 0.053 t.

Cardboard costs: 0.053 28000 = 1484 rubles.

Endpaper expenses.

Bookend paper weighing 120 g/m. 2; price for 1 ton - 30000 rub.

Endpaper costs: 1 paper. l. = 8 copies; 5000/8 = 625 paper. l. + (5% technical waste) \u003d 625 + 31.25 \u003d 656.25 paper. l. · (0.91 · 120) = 71662.5 g = 0.072 tons · 30000 = 2160 rubles.

The total amount for paper, film, cardboard and flyleaf: 1680 + 10080 + 1484 + 2160 = 15404 rubles.

Editorial expenses

Editorial expenses for 1 academic-ed. sheet according to the business plan of the publishing house for the current year is 800 rubles.

Editorial expenses: 16,800 = 12,800 rubles.

Binding and printing costs

Under an agreement with a printing house, the cost of printing works for one copy of a book block is 25 rubles, for one copy of the binding - 12 rubles.

Printing costs for the entire circulation: 37 5000 = 185000 rubles.

The cost of binding materials and printing services: 15404 + 185000 = 200404 rubles.

General publishing expenses

General publishing costs for 1 uch.-ed. sheet according to the business plan of the publishing house for the current year is 1600 rubles: 16 1600 \u003d 25600 rubles.

General publishing cost

Selling expenses

Commercial expenses are taken as 5% of the total cost: (258804/95) 5 = 13621 rubles.

Full cost

We summarize the costs: editorial, printing costs, paper and binding materials, general publishing and commercial costs: 258804 + 13621 = 272425 rubles.

Profit calculation

The cost of one copy is: 272425/5000 = 54 rubles / copy.

Profitability is planned in the amount of 25% of the total cost: 54 25/100 = 13 rubles / copy.

Thus, the added value is: 54 + 13 = 67 rubles.

Selling price

VAT is 10%, then the amount of VAT per copy: 67 10/100 = 6.7 rubles.

Selling price of one copy: 67 + 6.7 = 74 rubles.

The meaning of the work of the novel "The Idiot" or who is Prince Myshkin?

The creative path of Dostoevsky is a path of searching, often tragic delusions. But no matter how we argue with the great novelist, no matter how we disagree with him on some vital issues, we always feel his rejection of the bourgeois world, his humanism, his passionate dream of a harmonious, bright life.

Dostoevsky's position in the social struggle of his era is extremely complex, contradictory, and tragic. The writer is unbearably hurt for a person, for his crippled life, desecrated dignity, and he passionately seeks a way out of the realm of evil and violence into the world of goodness and truth. Searches but does not find. The famous novel by F. M. Dostoevsky “The Idiot”, written in 1869, testifies to how complex and contradictory his social position was.

In this work, it is not society that judges the hero, but the hero - society. In the center of the novel is not the hero's "deed", not a misdemeanor, but "non-doing", the worldly vanity of vanities, sucking the hero in. He involuntarily accepts acquaintances and events imposed on him. The hero does not at all try to rise above people, he himself is vulnerable. But he's taller than them kind person. He does not want or ask anything for himself from anyone. In The Idiot there is no logically predetermined end of events. Myshkin drops out of their flow and leaves for where he came from, to “neutral” Switzerland, again to the hospital: the world is not worth his kindness, you can’t change people.

Looking for moral ideal Dostoevsky was captivated by the “personality” of Christ and said that people needed Christ as a symbol, as a faith, otherwise humanity itself would crumble, get bogged down in the game of interests. The writer acted as a deep believer in the feasibility of the ideal. Truth for him is the fruit of the efforts of the mind, and Christ is something organic, universal, all-conquering.

Of course, the equal sign (Myshkin - Christ) is conditional, Myshkin - ordinary person. But there is a tendency to equate the hero with Christ: complete moral purity brings Myshkin closer to Christ. And outwardly, Dostoevsky brought them closer: Myshkin, at the age of Christ, as he is depicted in the Gospel, he is twenty-seven years old, he is pale, with sunken cheeks, with a light, pointed beard. His eyes are large and intent. The whole manner of behavior, conversation, all-forgiving sincerity, great insight, devoid of any selfishness and selfishness, irresponsibility for insults - all this has the stamp of ideality.

Christ struck Dostoevsky's imagination from childhood. After the penal servitude, he loved him all the more, for not a single system of views, not a single earthly model were already authorities for him.

Myshkin is conceived as a person who has come as close as possible to the ideal of Christ. But the deeds of the hero were described as completely real biography. Switzerland is introduced into the novel not by chance: from its mountain peaks Myshkin descended to the people. The hero’s poverty and sickness, when the title “prince” sounds somehow out of place, are signs of his spiritual enlightenment, closeness to ordinary people bear in themselves something suffering, akin to the Christian ideal, and in Myshkin something infantile always remains.

The story of Marie, stoned by fellow villagers, which he tells already in the St. Petersburg salon, resembles the gospel story of Mary Magdalene, the meaning of which is compassion for the sinner.

This quality of all-forgiving kindness will manifest itself in Myshkin many times. While still on the train, on the way to St. Petersburg, the image of Natalya Filippovna, who had already acquired the notoriety of Trotsky's concubine, Rogozhin's mistress, would be described to him, but he would not condemn her. Then they will show her to Myshkin at the Yepanchins, and with admiration he “recognizes her, speaks of her beauty and explains the main thing in her face: the seal of “suffering”, she endured a lot.” For Myshkin, "suffering" is the highest reason for respect.

Myshkin always has on his lips the commandments: "Who among us is not without sin", "Do not throw a stone at a penitent sinner." On the other hand, it was important to Dostoevsky that Myshkin should not turn out to be an evangelical scheme. The writer endowed him with some autobiographical features. It gave life to the image. Myshkin is sick with epilepsy - this explains a lot in his behavior. Dostoevsky once stood on the scaffold, and Myshkin tells a story in the Yepanchins' house about what a person feels a minute before the execution: he was told about this by a patient who was treated by a professor in Switzerland.

Myshkin, like the author, is the son of a seedy nobleman and the daughter of a Moscow merchant. The appearance of Myshkin in the Epanchins' house, his non-secularism are also autobiographical traits: this is how Dostoevsky felt in the house of General Korvin-Krukovsky when he was courting his eldest of his daughters, Anna. She was known as the same beauty and "idol of the family" as Aglaya Yepanchina.

The writer made sure that the naive, simple-hearted, open-minded prince at the same time was not ridiculous, was not humiliated. On the contrary, so that sympathy for him would grow, precisely because he does not get angry with people: "for they do not know what they are doing."

One of the acute issues in the novel is the appearance of modern man, the "loss of good looks" in human relations.

The terrible world of proprietors, greedy, cruel, vile servants of the money bag is shown by Dostoevsky in all its dirty unattractiveness. Here is the successful General Yepanchin, vulgar and limitedly self-satisfied, using his position for his own enrichment. And the insignificant Ganechka Ivolgin, hungry for money, dreaming of getting rich in any way, and the refined, hypocritical and cowardly aristocrat Trotsky.

As an artist and thinker, Dostoevsky created a wide social canvas, in which he truthfully showed the terrible, inhuman character of the bourgeois-noble society, torn apart by self-interest, ambition, and monstrous egoism. The images he created of Trotsky, Rogozhin, General Yepanchin, Ganya Ivolgin and many others captured with fearless authenticity the moral decay, the poisoned atmosphere of this society with its flagrant contradictions.

As well as he could, Myshkin tried to elevate all people above vulgarity, to raise them to some ideals of goodness, but to no avail.

Myshkin is the embodiment of Christian love. But such love, love-pity, is not understood, it is unsuitable for people, too high and incomprehensible: “one must love with love.” Dostoevsky leaves this motto of Myshkin without any evaluation; such love does not take root in the world of self-interest, although it remains an ideal. Pity, compassion - that's the first thing a person needs.

Myshkin-Christ is clearly and hopelessly entangled in earthly affairs, involuntarily, according to the most invincible logic of life, he sows not good, but evil. He did not grow up to be an accuser, but, like Chatsky, the unreasonable world called him crazy. He was forced to return with a broken heart to Switzerland, Schneider's hospital, where they recognized that he had a complete damage to his mind. The human world destroyed it.

The meaning of the work is in a broad reflection of the contradictions of Russian post-reform life, general discord, loss of "decency", "plausibility".

The strength of the novel is in the artistic use of the contrast between the ideal spiritual values ​​developed by mankind over many centuries, ideas about the goodness and beauty of deeds, on the one hand, and the true established relationships between people based on money, calculation, prejudices, on the other.

The Prince-Christ could not offer convincing solutions instead of vicious love: how to live and which way to go.

Dostoevsky in the novel "The Idiot" tried to create the image of a "quite a wonderful person." And you need to evaluate the work not on small plot situations, but on the basis of the general plan. The question of the improvement of mankind is eternal, it is raised by all generations, it is the “content of history”.

"Idiot" Dostoevsky F.M.

The novel "" became the realization of F.M. Dostoevsky, his main character - Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, according to the author's judgment is "a truly wonderful personality", he is the embodiment of goodness and Christian morality. And it is precisely for his disinterestedness, kindness and honesty, extraordinary philanthropy in the world of money and hypocrisy that Myshkin's entourage calls an "idiot." Prince Myshkin spent most of his life in isolation, going out into the world, he did not know what horrors of inhumanity and cruelty he would have to face. Lev Nikolaevich symbolically fulfills the mission of Jesus Christ and, like him, perishes loving and forgiving humanity. Just as Christ, the prince, is trying to help all the people who surround him, he is trying to heal their souls with his kindness and incredible insight.

The image of Prince Myshkin is the center of the composition of the novel, everything is connected with him. storylines and heroes: the family of General Yepanchin, the merchant Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna, Ganya Ivolgin, and others. And also the center of the novel is a bright contrast between the virtue of Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin and the usual way of life secular society. Dostoevsky was able to show that even for the heroes themselves, this contrast looks terrifying, they did not understand this boundless kindness and, therefore, were afraid of it.

The novel is filled with symbols, here Prince Myshkin symbolizes Christian love, Nastasya Filippovna - beauty. The picture “Dead Christ” has a symbolic character, from the contemplation of which, according to Prince Myshkin, one can lose faith.

The lack of faith and spirituality become the causes of the tragedy that happened at the end of the novel, the meaning of which is regarded in different ways. The author focuses on the fact that the physical and spiritual beauty will perish in a world that puts only self-interest and profit as an absolute.

The writer insightfully noticed the growth of individualism and the ideology of "Napoleonism". Adhering to the ideas of individual freedom, he at the same time believed that unlimited self-will leads to inhuman acts. Dostoevsky considered crime as the most typical manifestation of individualistic self-affirmation. He saw in the revolutionary movement of his time an anarchist revolt. In his novel, he not only created an image of impeccable goodness equal to the biblical one, but showed the development of the characters of all the heroes of the novel who interacted with Myshkin for the better.