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Abstract:

The article attempts to unravel the special “charm” of Crime and Punishment’s character Svidrigailov on the modern reader, as indicated by Boris Tikhomirov. What is Svidrigailov’s “own novel” in which Dostoevsky “inspiringly develops a new kind of characterology and psychology” [Tikhomirov, 2011, p. 148]? Do the chapters about Svidrigailov form a kind of “text within the text” in which the narrative structure is built not by the author, but by the hero, discovering Svidrigailov’s “charm” as the attractive power of a character who has stepped from the 19th into the 20th century? The article shows that Dostoevsky not only influenced the literature of postmodernism, but also, in Crime and Punishment—in the form of “Svidrigailov’s text,” a “novel in a novel” — created a prototype of the postmodern novel in which the narrative structure is built not by the author, but by the hero, where the laws of cryptopoetics prevail, together with a fragmentary composition, and shifting the narrative plans from the real reproduction of events to an illusory, dreamlike one, or even to the delusional associations of the protagonist. Inspiringly developing “a new kind of characterology and psychology” in the image of Svidrigailov, the writer reveals the prototype of the modernist and postmodernist hero. Here lies Svidrigailov’s special charm, expressed in Dostoevsky’s time “covertly” and “diviningly” (Boris Tikhomirov) and in our time clearly manifested in his proximity to the modern hero with his love of games, his irony, cynicism, lack of faith, theatricalization of life conflicts, attitude toward mythologization, and a mixture of the planes of being and non-being.

Keywords: Dostoevsky, Svidrigailov, modernism, postmodernism, “novel in a novel,” game, irony, theatricalization, mythologization, deconstruction.