City as an explicant of the key concepts in Dostoevsky’s “The Adolescent

Abstract

The perception of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a literary painter of St. Petersburg has become an axiom in literary criticism. However, modern researchers pay attention to the significance of other cities for the writer, which are inextricably linked both with his biography and his work. Fyodor Dostoevsky not only instantly noticed visual metaphors and historical and cultural narratives of the places where he was destined to be, but he also included presciently read city texts in his literary works. This article is aimed to identify those ‘local texts’ of the urban space in the novel “The Adolescent”, which contribute to the reconstruction and representation of its basic concepts. This research affirms the consistency and integrity of the artistic geo-panorama created by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The creation and representation of concepts both by the writer and his heroes are carried out by comparing individual points and forming a kind of textual ‘isolines’. As an analytical and illustrative material, various mo­difications of such “isolines” of are given, the elements of which are St. Petersburg, Mos­cow, Ko­nigsberg, and Ems. The local texts of these cities contribute to the restoration of the nucleus meanings of the basic concepts of the penultimate work by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which include: disorder, ugliness, goodness, random family, strength, heart, living life, pilgrimage, wandering, care, and flunkeyism.

Keywords

• fyodor dostoevsky
• novel “the adolescent”
• city
• concept
• local text
• petersburg text
• moscow text
• königsberg text
• ems text