Poetics and Textual Analysis of Dostoevsky’s Novel The Adolescent in the Studies of Russian Authors of the 1920s-1940s

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Author: Olga A. Bogdanova
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DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, Department of Russian Literature of the Late 19th – Early 20th Centuries, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7004-498X

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Bogdanova, O.A. “Poetics and Textual Analysis of Dostoevsky’s Novel The Adolescent in the Studies of Russian Authors of the 1920s–1940s”. Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological journal, no. 4 (16), 2021, pp. 130–175. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2021-4-130-175
Received: 02 Aug. 2021
Published: 25 Dec. 2021
Issue: 2021 no. 4 (16)
Department: DOSTOEVSKY IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES: RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES
Pages: 130-175
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2021-4-130-175
UDK: 821.161.1.0
BBK: 83+83.3(2=411.2)+86.2
Keywords: Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, first half of the 21st century, Soviet academy, Russian emigration, manuscript corpus, textual criticism, poetics.
Abstract: In the 1920s–1940s poetics became the main aspect of the study of The Adolescent both in the USSR and in Russian emigration. Of particular importance is the work on the handwritten corpus of the novel. The review examines the publications of the surviving manuscripts and the main studies devoted to their analysis. The stages of poetics studies and textual criticism on The Adolescent are traced in chronological order. The review consists of three sections: studies on the poetics and textual studies of The Adolescent in 1920s USSR (L.P. Grossman, N.P. Antsiferov, R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, V.L. Komarovich, M.G. Davidovich, B.M. Engelgardt, S.A. Askoldov, S.N. Durylin, M.M. Bakhtin); Russian emigration about the poetics of The Adolescent in 1920s-1940s (I.I. Lapshin, R.V. Pletnev, A.L. Bem, P.M. Bicilli, K.V. Mochulsky); studies on the poetics of The Adolescent in 1930s-1940s USSR (G.I. Chulkov, A.S. Dolinin). The main issues that occupied Soviet and emigrant scholars of the 1920s and 1940s are highlighted: the ideological and artistic continuity of the novels The Devils, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov as the development of the idea of the plan for The Life of a Great Sinner; Dostoevsky’s creative method in the novel The Adolescent; the creative history and type of the novel; plot-compositional features and narrative strategies; motives and symbols; typology and characterology of heroes, including reminiscences from Griboedov and Pushkin, artistic polemics with L.N. Tolstoy and “duality”; prototypes of characters; speech style. The chapter on the novel in the book Dostoevsky. Life and Works by the emigrant scholar K.V. Mochulsky (1947) is recognized as the pinnacle of the study of The Adolescent in the first half of the 20th century, as it absorbed practically the entire research discourse on both sides of the USSR border and gave a complete picture of its problems and poetics. At the same time, the book is free from the traces of ideological coercion that Soviet scholars experienced in the 1930s and 1940s.

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