The Mouse and The Icon: on the Ethnographic Roots of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

Abstract

The article focuses on a well-known episode of the novel by Dostoevsky Demons where the narrator calls placing the mouse in the icon case “a senseless, mocking blasphemy.” Unlike the obvious narrative function — to symbolize a series of coming catastrophes — internal semantic mechanism of blasphemy remains unsolved in the text of the novel and in the studies devoted to it. Several documents were discovered inside the investigation cases of the Secret Chancellery and the Holy Synod of the 18th century, which allow us to trace such ethnographic parallels to this motif as rites of exorcising mice, circus performances with trained mice as well as dance songs with wedding or erotic theme, which form the functional and semantic sphere of blasphemous games and anti-behavior expressed by professional jesters, peasants, and clergymen. Moreover, the article reveals important correlation between the mechanisms behind the written and oral denunciations of blasphemy in the investigation trials of the 18th century and the principles of storytelling on the level of the "crime" plotline of Dostoevsky’s novel.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• demons
• russian folklore and literature of the 18th–19th centuries
• blasphemy
• buffoonery.