The Otherworld in Dostoevsky’s Short Story “Bobok”

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Author: Nikolay N. Podosokorsky
Information about the author:

PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, Research Centre “Dostoevsky and World Culture,” A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6310-1579

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For citation:

Podosokorsky, N.N. “The Otherworld in Dostoevsky’s Short Story ‘Bobok’.” Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological journal, no. 1 (21), 2023, pp. 62–95. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2023-1-62-95
Received: 05 Feb. 2023
Published: 25 March 2023
Issue: 2023 no. 1 (21)
Department: POETICS. CONTEXT
Pages: 62-95
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2023-1-62-95
EDN:

https://elibrary.ru/XDVHTU
UDK: 821.161.1.0
BBK: 83.3
Keywords: “Bobok,” A Writer’s Diary, vision, otherworld, Aerial toll houses, Eckartshausen, Lucian, dialogues of the dead, beans, peas, Pythagoras, afterlife, afterworld, mysticism, evil spirits.
Abstract: The article is devoted to the study of the description of the otherworld in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s mystical story “Bobok,” first published in 1873 in the author’s column A Writer’s Diary of the weekly Grazhdanin (Dostoevsky was at the time both author and editor of the magazine.) The short story is considered in the context of other texts of the column and the writer’s previous statements about the problem of human afterlife. Special attention is paid in the article to the interpretation of the title of the story, with its reference to beans, which have been related to the world of the dead in many cultures since ancient times. For this reason, various sources on the history of religion, ethnography and folklore are considered. The article also deals with the theme of the dead souls’ passing through aerial toll houses in the story and the unexpected role people play in this passage according to Dostoevsky. It is proved that the most obvious and attention-grabbing journalistic and satirical layer of the story “Bobok” does not exhaust the author’s intention at all, and it is not able to determine the depth of this work.

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