F.M. Dostoevsky’s Story “The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree”: the Image Structure and the Aesthetics of Action

Abstract

Most of all Dostoevsky’s texts, “The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree” poses questions about the structure of image in the author’s works, and about the intentional focus of the literary text, aiming to offer the reader another view of the reality surrounding him, to “wash” his/her eyes, covered by the dirt flowing from “the proximate and the visible in its flowing immediacy” and closed by the crust of humdrum. Solving the question of the structure of the image allows us to answer the question of how deepness is reached in Dostoevsky’s texts. The two-fold image in Dostoevsky’s works is described, as well as its analogues in the Christian culture, the qualities and characteristics of such an image, the way it is shaped through the reproduction of iconic images or through allusions to the Gospels, and its essential role in creating a space for the reader’s personal action. The article also concerns the differences occurring between this kind of image and another one – the Symbolists’ image – whose aim was to awake memories, to recognize and to comprehend the permanent patterns of human actions and relations, but not to change these patterns. The tale displays a double layer concerning not only human, but also space images, the presence of the already transfigured space in the depth of mundanity, whose appearance is prevented by human indolence, indifference, and the fact of being focused on the self.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• “the beggar boy at christ's christmas tree”
• image structure
• image deepness
• aesthetics of action
• intention of the literary work
• icon
• biblical precedent text