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Abstract:

The article, divided into several sections, examines the ways in which Dostoevsky creates what can be called a “deep text”—deep both in its structure, which presupposes a multilayered and complex connectivity of different parts, and in its impact on the reader. In fact, the reading of a deep text affects not merely the consciousness (which lacks sufficient time to process and comprehend its structure—and thus to filter the text’s inherent intentions) but deeper personal structures, which seem to “grasp” the author’s intention through direct sensations, much as in real-life interactions, when we gain vivid personal experience. One of the means of creating a deep text is the author’s strategy of inserting “ultimate” questions into the characters’ direct speech: questions that define the basic parameters of human existence and stimulate the reader’s consciousness along with deeper layers of the psyche. Dostoevsky presents the answers to those questions non-discursively, through other means, so that the reader’s consciousness remains in a state of searching and unfulfilled to the end, while the deeper layers of the psyche—whose “language” encodes these answers—record them as if personally obtained through experience. In this regard, the article demonstrates how textual critics’ unjustified edits traumatize Dostoevsky’s text when they erroneously choose the first publication as a guideline, despite the fact that, as well known, it was created under editorial pressure and subsequently amended once the author was no longer bound by journal constraints. Additionally, the article shows the fallacy of interpreting Dostoevsky’s biblical and liturgical quotations through the principle of “one quotation, one meaning.” The article illustrates how Dostoevsky employs microquotes to create a complex text imbued with profound philosophical and theological meaning.

Keywords: Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, writer’s theology, authorial strategies, deep text, holistic analysis of an episode, microanalysis of text, hesychasm, Philokalia, The Drunkards, biblical allusions and quotes, character’s name, “theophany” of a character, sin, concept as “grasping,” textual rhymes, Sonya Marmeladova.