Schismatics in F. M. Dosto-yevsky’s The House of the Dead: The Interaction of an Artistic Text with Political Essays

Abstract

This article is devoted to the motif of Schism in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead. The analysis marks the interaction of The House… with the essays of the 1860s. While depicting the meek image of an old schismatic (Rus. raskolnik), Dostoyevsky exaggerated the seriousness of his crime in order to emphasise his rebellious potential. This echoes Dostoyevsky’s controversy with the Westernisers and Slavophiles in his essay Two Camps, where in the advocates of the Schism, he sees aspiration for truth, which he considers a pledge of hope for the future in Russian life. In the depiction of prison runaways (Rus. beguny) in The House…, one can see the possible impact of A. P. Shchapov’s article on sectarian runaways: in both works, escape is understood in the first place as a form of popular protest. The need for suffering in The House… is not characteristic of the runaways, but of the old schismatic and another prisoner. Moreover, nothing is said about the purifying function of suffering, which is one of the most important topics of Dostoyevsky’s later works. The schismatic and runaways in The House… foreshadow Makar Dolgoruky in Dostoyevsky’s The Raw Youth. However, the schismatic’s ambivalent image is still far from Makar’s ideal image. The paradoxical image of the latter became the basis of a series of characters of Dostoyevsky’s later works, in whom “haughtiness” is combined with “meekness”.

Keywords

• Достоевский
• старообрядчество
• сектантство
• бегун
• Щапов
• Салтыков-Щедрин
• почвенничество.