Reflections on the Role of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot

Abstract

The article considers possible directions of research of the role of the novel by Alexandre Dumas père The Three Musketeers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, since it is with the Three Musketeers that General Ivolgin compares himself, Epanchin, and Myshkin-father. The paper analyses Dostoevsky’s statements about the work and personality of Dumas found in his articles. Thus, in the introduction to “A Series of Articles on Russian Literature” the writer notes that the protagonist of Merimee’s drama Le Faux Demetrius came out “terribly similar to Alexandre Dumas.” The article analyses the image of False Dmitry and suggests that the similarity identified by Dostoevsky may lie in the liberty with which both authors treat historical information for personal gain (to attract readers or supporters in a political intrigue). Furthermore, in the article we refer to the review of the exhibition at the Academy of Arts in 1860–1861, which compares the artistic methods of Dumas and Aivazovsky, who preferred in their artistic work to recur to excessive effects, which often “hurt the viewer to look at”, to commonplaces. On the basis of these and other observations, an assumption is made about Dostoevsky’s convergence of the images of the writer Dumas and General Ivolgin. The last part of the article analyses the novel The Three Musketeers and the images of its main characters. The definitions of the trio of friends (“inseparable” and “cavalcade”) emphasized by the General and being direct quotations from the original text become the “point of entry” into the French text.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• dumas père
• the idiot
• the three musketeers
• general ivolgin
• history
• inseparable
• cavalcade