: “... he is the eldest son of this short-haired captain and was in another room; unwell and lay all day today. But he is so strange; he is terribly touchy, and it seemed to me that he would be ashamed of you, since you came at such a moment ...<...>Hippolyte is a magnificent fellow, but he is a slave to other prejudices.
“You say he has consumption?”
“Yes, I think it would be better if he died sooner rather than later. If I were in his place, I would certainly want to die. He feels sorry for his brothers and sisters, these little ones. If it were possible, if only money, we would rent a separate apartment with him and give up our families. This is our dream. And you know what, when I told him just now about your case, he even became so angry, he said that the one who misses a slap in the face and does not challenge him to a duel is a scoundrel. However, he is terribly annoyed, I have already stopped arguing with him ... "

For the first time, Hippolyte appears at the forefront of the action in the company at the dacha, when young people showed up demanding part of the inheritance. “Ippolit was a very young man, about seventeen, maybe eighteen, with an intelligent, but constantly irritated expression on his face, on which the illness left terrible marks. He was thin as a skeleton, pale yellow, his eyes sparkled, and two red spots burned on his cheeks. He coughed incessantly; his every word, almost every breath was accompanied by a wheeze. Consumption was visible in a very strong degree. It seemed that he had no more than two, three weeks to live ... "

Ippolit Terentyev in the world of Dostoevsky is one of the most "main" suicides (along with such heroes as, ...), although his suicide attempt failed. But the point is the very idea of ​​suicide, which swallowed him up, became his idée fixe, became his essence. In addition to Ippolit, many characters in The Idiot, and even the main ones ( , ), now and then dream and talk about suicide, so, apparently, it is no coincidence that in the preliminary plans for Terentyev, this - not among the main - hero, a significant litter appears - entry: “Ippolit is the main axis of the whole novel...” Yesterday’s very young high school student Ippolit Terentyev was sentenced to death by consumption. Before his imminent death, he needs to solve the most fundamental question: was there any sense in his birth and life? And from this follows another - even more global - question: is there any meaning in life at all? And out of this arises the most comprehensive question of human existence on earth, exciting and tormenting Dostoevsky himself: is there immortality? Again, it is highly significant that in preparatory materials Ippolit is practically compared with Hamlet by the entry-question: “To live or not to live?..” In this sense, Terentyev is, as it were, the forerunner of Kirillov from The Possessed. It is important to emphasize that, as is often the case with Dostoevsky, he entrusts his innermost thoughts-problems to the hero, who would seem to be very unsympathetic: strong even for Dostoevsky. And this refrain will be persistently repeated: “shouted to the shrill<...> in the voice of Hippolyte”, “Hippolit squealed again”, “Hippolit picked up shrillly”, “Hippolit squealed”, etc., etc. In just one scene, on just one page of the novel, Hippolyte "squeals" four times - each time as soon as he opens his mouth. With such a "gift" it is difficult to arouse sympathy among others and make them agree with your arguments, even if you are one hundred percent right. But even this is not enough. Hippolyte, as can be seen from his behavior and as he frankly admits in his confession, in his "Necessary Explanation" before his death, in his relationships with others does not forget about the basic law of life formulated by him: "People are created to torment each other .. But, perhaps, the following extravagant passage from the Explanation characterizes his nature, his state of mind even more clearly: “There are people who find extreme pleasure in their irritable touchiness, and especially when it comes to them (which always happens very quickly ) up to the last limit; at this moment, it even seems to be more pleasant for them to be offended than not offended ... ”Hippolit’s shrillness testifies to his chronically excited state, to a continuous attack of irritable resentment. This irritable resentment is like a protective mask. Because of his illness, he feels flawed, he suspects that everyone and everything is laughing at him, that he is disgusting to everyone, that no one needs him and, in the end, is not even interesting. Moreover, we must not forget that this, in fact, is still quite a boy, a teenager (almost the same age as the “future teenager”!) With all the complexes and ambitions that accompany age. Hippolyte terribly, for example, wants to be a "teacher." “After all, you are all terribly fond of beauty and elegance of forms, you only stand for them, don’t you? (I suspected for a long time that it was only for them!)...”, he pronounces to the whole society of adults gathered in the room, as if imitating from the story “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants”. Ruthless, noticing this feature in poor Hippolyte, cruelly ridicules him, teases him: “... I wanted to ask you, Mr. Terentyev, whether I heard the truth that you are of the opinion that it costs you only a quarter of an hour to talk to the people at the window, and he will immediately agree with you in everything and will immediately follow you ... ” Hippolytus confirms: yes - he said and affirmed this. So, he feels in himself the gift of a preacher, or rather, an agitator-propagandist, for he considers himself an atheist. However, atheism weighs on him, atheism is not enough for him: “You know that I am not eighteen years old: I have lain on this pillow for so long, and looked through this window so much, and thought so much. .. about everyone... that... A dead man never has years, you know.<...>I suddenly thought: these are the people, and they will never be again, and never! And the trees too - there will be one brick wall, red<...>You know, I am convinced that nature is very mocking... You said just now that I am an atheist, but you know that this nature...”

At this point, Hippolyte cut off his confessional thought, suspecting again that the listeners were laughing at him, but his longing from the burden of feigned atheism rushes out uncontrollably, and, a little later, he continues: “Oh, how much I wanted! I don’t want anything now, I don’t want to want anything, I gave myself such a word that I would no longer want anything; let them seek the truth without me! Yes, nature is funny! Why would she,” he suddenly added with warmth, “why does she create the best creatures in order to ridicule them later? She made it so that the only creature that was recognized on earth as perfection ... she made it so that, having shown him to people, she intended to tell him that because of which so much blood was shed, that if it were shed all at once , then people would probably choke! Oh good thing I'm dying! I, too, perhaps, would have told some terrible lie, nature would have let me down like that! .. I did not corrupt anyone ... I wanted to live for the happiness of all people, for the discovery and proclaiming of the truth ...<...>and what happened? Nothing! It turns out that you despise me! Therefore, the fool, therefore, is not needed, therefore, it's time! And I couldn't leave any memories! Not a sound, not a trace, not a single deed, did not spread a single conviction! .. Do not laugh at a fool! Forget! Forget everything... forget it, please don't be so cruel! Do you know that if this consumption had not turned up, I would have killed myself ... ”The mention of Christ is especially important here (moreover, what a nuance: the “atheist” Ippolit does not name, does not dare to call Him by name!) And recognition in suicidal intent. Hippolyte all the time, as it were, is moving (towards death) along the narrow plank between atheism and faith. “And what do we all care what happens next! ..”, he exclaims, and immediately, after that, he takes out a package with his “Necessary Explanation” from his pocket, which gives him at least some hope that - no, he is all won't die...

However, as an epigraph to his confession, this teenager takes perhaps the most atheistic-cynical exclamation in the history of mankind, attributed to Louis XV: “Après moi le déluge!” ( fr.“After us, at least a flood!”). Yes, in form and in essence, “My Necessary Explanation” is a confession. And confession is dying. In addition, what the listeners do not immediately guess is the confession of a suicide, for Ippolit decided to artificially speed up his already near end. Hence the extreme frankness. Hence - a clear touch of cynicism, in many respects, as in the case of, feigned. Ippolit is tormented by torment, the resentment of an unrevealed person, not understood, not appreciated. First of all, the incredibly terrible dream about the “shell-shaped animal”, described and reproduced by him on the first pages of his “Explanation”, is shocking in Hippolyte’s confession: “I fell asleep<...> and saw that I was in one room (but not in mine). The room is bigger and taller than mine, better furnished, bright, closet, chest of drawers, sofa and my bed, large and wide and covered with a green silk quilt. But in this room, I noticed one terrible animal, some kind of monster. It was like a scorpion, but not a scorpion, but uglier and much more terrible, and, it seems, precisely because there are no such animals in nature, and that it appeared to me on purpose, and that some kind of mystery lies in this very thing. I made out it very well: it is brown and shell-like, a reptile reptile, four inches long, two fingers thick at the head, gradually thinner towards the tail, so that the very tip of the tail is no more than a tenth of an inch thick. An inch from the head, from the body, at an angle of forty-five degrees, two paws, one on each side, an inch two in length, so that the whole animal appears, when viewed from above, in the form of a trident. I did not see the head, but I saw two antennae, not long, in the form of two strong needles, also brown. The same two antennae at the end of the tail and at the end of each of the paws, therefore, in total, eight antennae. The animal ran very quickly around the room, resting on its paws and tail, and when it ran, both its body and paws writhed like snakes, with unusual speed, despite the shell, and it was very disgusting to look at. I was terribly afraid that it would sting me; I was told that it was poisonous, but I was most tormented by those who sent it to my room, what they want to do to me, and what is the secret here? It hid under a chest of drawers, under a wardrobe, crawled into corners. I sat down on a chair with my legs and tucked them under me. It quickly ran obliquely across the whole room and disappeared somewhere near my chair. I looked around in fear, but since I sat with my legs crossed, I hoped that it would not crawl onto a chair. Suddenly I heard behind me, almost at my head, some kind of crackling rustle; I turned around and saw that the bastard was crawling up the wall and was already on a level with my head, and even touched my hair with its tail, which was twisting and wriggling with extreme speed. I jumped up, and the animal disappeared. I was afraid to lie on the bed, so that it would not crawl under the pillow. My mother and a friend of hers came into the room. They began to catch the reptile, but they were calmer than me, and were not even afraid. But they didn't understand. Suddenly the bastard crawled out again; this time he crawled very quietly and as if with some special intention, slowly wriggling, which was even more disgusting, again diagonally across the room, towards the doors. Then my mother opened the door and called Norma, our dog, a huge turnef, black and shaggy; died five years ago. She rushed into the room and stood over the reptile as if rooted to the spot. The reptile also stopped, but still writhing and clicking on the floor with the ends of its paws and tail. Animals cannot feel mystical fright, if I am not mistaken; but at that moment it seemed to me that in Norma's fright there was something, as it were, very unusual, as if also almost mystical, and that she, therefore, also had a presentiment, like me, that there was something fatal in the beast and what - that's a secret. She moved slowly back in front of the reptile that was slowly and cautiously crawling towards her; he seemed to want to suddenly rush at her and sting her. But despite all the fright, Norma looked terribly vicious, though trembling in all members. Suddenly she slowly bared her terrible teeth, opened her whole huge red mouth, adjusted herself, contrived, made up her mind and suddenly grabbed the reptile with her teeth. The bastard must have rushed hard to get out, so Norma caught him again, this time on the fly, and twice with her whole mouth absorbed him into herself, all on the fly, as if swallowing. The shell cracked on her teeth; the animal's tail and paws emerging from its mouth moved with terrible speed. Suddenly Norma squealed plaintively: the reptile managed to sting her tongue. With a squeal and a howl, she opened her mouth in pain, and I saw that the gnawed reptile was still moving across her mouth, releasing a lot of white juice from its half-crushed body onto her tongue, similar to the juice of a crushed black cockroach ... "

Living with such a shell-like insect in dreams, or more precisely, in the soul, is completely unbearable and impossible. This terrible allegory can even be understood and deciphered as follows: the shell-like animal not only settled and grew up in the soul of Hippolyte, but in general his whole soul, under the influence of cultivated cynical atheism, turned into a shell-like insect... And then the image of the shell-shaped insect transforms into a concrete the image of a tarantula: in one of the next delusional nightmares, “someone seemed to lead” Ippolit by the hand, “with a candle in his hands”, and showed him “some huge and disgusting tarantula”, which is “that very dark, deaf and omnipotent being," which rules the world, ruthlessly destroys life, denies immortality. And the tarantula, in turn, in the new nightmare of Hippolytus is personified with ..., who appeared to him in the form of a ghost. It was after this disgusting vision that Hippolyte finally decided to commit suicide. But it is especially important that the image of a tarantula and the ghost of Rogozhin (the future killer - the destroyer of life and beauty!) Follow-appear immediately after Ippolit's memories of the picture that struck him in the Rogozhins' house. This is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger "Dead Christ". On the canvas, Jesus Christ, just taken down from the cross, is depicted in close-up, moreover, in the most naturalistic, hyper-realistic manner - according to legend, the artist painted from life, and the real corpse of a drowned man served as his “sitter”. Earlier, in the same place, at the Rogozhins, Prince Myshkin saw this picture and, in a dialogue about it with Parfyon, he heard from the latter that he likes to look at this picture. “Yes, from this picture, another may still lose faith!” The prince cries out. And Rogozhin calmly admits: "Even that disappears ..." According to Myshkin, Myshkin's thought-exclamation is a verbatim reproduction of Dostoevsky's immediate impression of Holbein's painting when he saw it for the first time in Basel.

Thoughts of voluntary quick death had flickered in Hippolyte's irritated brain before. For example, in the scene when they stopped on the bridge and began to look at the Neva, Ippolit suddenly bends dangerously over the railing and asks his companion, they say, does he know what just came into his head, Hippolyte? Bakhmutov immediately guesses, exclaims: “Is it really possible to throw myself into the water? ..” “Maybe he read my thought in my face,” Terentyev confirms in Necessary Explanation. In the end, Hippolyte finally decides to destroy himself, because "he is unable to obey the dark force, which takes the form of a tarantula." And here another major and global idea-problem arises, which accompanies the suicidal theme inalienably, namely, the behavior of a person before an act of suicide, when human and in general all earthly and heavenly laws no longer have power over him. A person is given the opportunity to step over this line of unlimited permissiveness, and this step is directly dependent on the degree of a person’s anger at everything and everyone, on the degree of his cynical atheism, and finally on the degree of insanity of reason. Hippolyte reaches this thought, which is extremely dangerous for others, and rolls down. He was even amused by the idea that if he took it into his head to kill ten people now, then no court would have power over him and no punishments would be terrible for him, and he, on the contrary, last days spent in the comfort of a prison hospital under the care of doctors. Hippolytus, it is true, discusses this hot topic in connection with consumption, but it is clear that a consumptive patient who decides to commit suicide is even more self-willed in his crime. By the way, later, when the suicide scene happened and ended, Yevgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, in a conversation with Prince Myshkin, expresses a very poisonous and paradoxical conviction that Terentyev is unlikely to make a new suicide attempt, but he is quite capable of killing “ten people” before his death and advises the prince to try not to fall into the number of these ten ...

In the confession of Hippolytus, the right of a terminally ill person to commit suicide is substantiated: “... who, in the name of what right, in the name of what motive, would take it into his head to challenge my right to these two or three weeks of my term? What court is involved here? Who exactly needs me not only to be sentenced, but also to faithfully endure the term of the sentence? Does anyone really need it? For morality? I also understand that if, in the bloom of health and strength, I encroached on my life, which “could be useful to my neighbor,” etc., then morality could still reproach me, according to the old routine, for the fact that I disposed of my life without asking, or whatever she knows. But now, now that the sentence has already been read to me? What kind of morality do you still need beyond your life, and the last wheezing with which you will give up the last atom of life, listening to the consolations of the prince, who will certainly reach the happy thought in his Christian proofs that in essence it is even better that you are dying. (Christians like him always get this idea: it's their favorite thing.)<...>Why do I need your nature, your Pavlovsk park, your sunrises and sunsets, your blue sky and your all-satisfied faces, when did this whole feast, which has no end, begin with the fact that I alone was considered superfluous? What is it to me in all this beauty, when every minute, every second I must and am now forced to know that even this tiny fly, which is now buzzing around me in a ray of sunshine, and that even in all this feast and choir participant, knows its place , loves him and is happy, but I am one miscarriage, and only because of my cowardice I still did not want to understand this! .. "

It would seem that Hippolytus proves his right to manage his own life before people, but in fact he is trying to declare his right, of course, before heaven, and the mention of Christians here is very eloquent and, in this regard, unambiguously. And then Hippolyte directly says: “Religion! I allow eternal life and, perhaps, I have always allowed it. Let the consciousness be kindled by the will of a higher power, let it look back at the world and say: "I am!" it is necessary, let, I admit all this, but again eternal question Why was my humility necessary? Can't you just eat me without demanding praise from me for what ate me? Will there really be someone offended that I don't want to wait two weeks? I don’t believe this…” And even hidden thoughts on this topic, which is especially burning for him, break through at the end of “A Necessary Explanation”: “Meanwhile, I never, despite my best desire, could imagine that future life and there is no providence. It is most likely that all this exists, but that we do not understand anything about the future life and its laws. But if it is so difficult and even completely impossible to understand, then will I really be responsible for not being able to comprehend the incomprehensible? .. "

The struggle of faith and unbelief by an effort of will ends in Hippolytus with the victory of atheism, the assertion of self-will, the justification of rebellion against God, and he formulates the most fundamental postulate of suicide: “I will die, looking directly at the source of strength and life, and I will not want this life! If I had the power not to be born, I probably would not have accepted existence on such mocking terms. But I still have the power to die, although I give back what I have already counted. Not great power, not great rebellion.
The last explanation: I'm not dying because I can't bear these three weeks; oh, I would have had enough strength, and if I wanted to, I would have been consoled enough by the mere consciousness of the offense inflicted on me; but I am not a French poet and do not want such consolations. Finally, there is a temptation: nature has limited my activities to such an extent by her three weeks of sentence that, perhaps, suicide is the only thing that I can still have time to start and finish at my own will. Well, maybe I want to take advantage of the last opportunity of the case? Protest is sometimes not a small thing…”

The act of suicide, so spectacularly conceived by Hippolyte, carefully prepared and furnished by him, did not work out, fell through: in a fever, he forgot to put the primer in the pistol. But he pulled the trigger, but he fully experienced the moment-second of the transition to death. However, he died of consumption. “Ippolit died in a terrible agitation and somewhat earlier than expected, about two weeks after the death of Nastasya Filippovna ...”

Hippolyte is a young man who will soon have to leave this world, he suffers from consumption and completely cut himself off from the world. A young man of only 17 thinks like a wise philosopher. He looked a lot at the dirty wall of the opposite house, and in this looking he reflected on various essential details of being.

Of course, for Ippolit, as well as for Dostoevsky, the main question is the question of the meaning of existence and the inevitability of human death. The young man does not have a religious consciousness, he questions religion, but at the same time he does not become discouraged. In a strange way, he not only does not lose faith like Rogozhin, who looks at Goldbein's painting, but even affirms himself in his own faith.

The young Terentiev does not believe in the Resurrection, he believes in the universal mind, in the philosophical Lord whose goal is the general harmony and creation of the world. Therefore, Hippolytus does not lose faith, because his personal fate, sad and tragic, in fact, does not matter for world harmony. Even, perhaps, his personal suffering is necessary to maintain this harmony, for the possibility of the world mind to continue to comprehend itself.

Ippolit and Rogozhin are two extremes that are incredibly close. Rogozhin destroys another person, Ippolit destroys himself. Nevertheless, the young man could destroy many other people, moreover, he quite defiantly calls his final confession "Aprs moi le deluge" and quite clearly alludes to a rather deep understanding of his own position.

So, Rogozhin appears in this bundle of opposites as an example of maximum vitality and activity. Hippolyte, in turn, is a kind of lifelessness, he is, as it were, out of this world, looking at the Meyer wall. At the same time, the characters are quite similar and are almost in an identical position.

In fact, there is nothing special in the rapid death of Hippolytus from consumption. Indeed, through this hero, the author expresses a simple thought - if the Resurrection did not happen, then everyone is sentenced, regardless of the presence or absence of illness, and if everyone is sentenced in this way, then only a ruthless creator rules the whole world and a person cannot escape the nature that dominates him. .

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Introduction 2

Chapter 1. "Suicide with a loophole": The image of Ippolit Terentyev.

1.1. The image of Hippolytus and his place in the novel 10

1.2. Ippolit Terentiev: "lost soul" 17

1.3. Riot Hippolyta 23

Chapter 2

2.1. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" and its place in the "Diary of a Writer" 32

2.2. The image of a "funny person" 35

2.3. Secrets of the dream of a "funny man" 40

2.4. "Awakening" and the rebirth of "funny

human" 46

Conclusion 49

References 55

INTRODUCTION

The world is in constant search for truth. After the appearance of Christ as the ideal of man in the flesh, it became clear that the highest, last development of the human personality must reach the point where “man found, realized and became convinced that the highest use that a person can make of his personality is to destroy to give it to everyone undividedly and wholeheartedly,” says Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Man “needs, first of all, that, despite all the meaninglessness of world life, there should be a general condition for meaningfulness, that its last, highest and absolute basis should not be a blind chance, not muddy, throwing everything out for a moment, and again absorbing everything, the flow of time, not the darkness of ignorance, but God as the eternal stronghold, eternal life, the absolute good and the all-encompassing light of reason.

Christ is love, goodness, beauty and Truth. It is necessary for a person to strive for them, because if a person does not fulfill the “law of striving for the ideal”, then suffering and spiritual confusion await him.

Dostoevsky, of course, is a man of "intelligent stock", and he is undoubtedly a man struck by universal injustice. He himself repeatedly spoke about the injustice reigning in the world with excruciating pain, and it is this feeling that forms the basis of the constant thoughts of his heroes. This feeling gives rise to a protest in the souls of the heroes, reaching a “rebellion” against the Creator: Raskolnikov, Ippolit Terentyev, Ivan Karamazov are noted for this. The feeling of injustice and powerlessness before it cripple the consciousness and psyche of the heroes, sometimes turning them into twitchy, grimacing neurasthenics. For a reasonable, thinking person (especially for a Russian intellectual prone to reflection), injustice is always "nonsense, unreasonable." Dostoevsky and his heroes, struck by the disasters of the world, are looking for a reasonable foundation for life.

The acquisition of faith is not a one-time act, it is a path, everyone has their own, but always conscious and infinitely sincere. The path of Dostoevsky himself, a man who survived the horror of the death penalty, fell from the pinnacle of intellectual life into the swamp of hard labor, found himself among thieves and murderers, was full of grief and doubts. And in this darkness - His bright image, embodied in the New Testament, the only refuge for those who, like Dostoevsky, found themselves on the verge of life and death with one thought - to survive and keep the soul alive.

Dostoyevsky's brilliant insights are countless. He saw the horror of life, but also that there is a way out in God. He never talked about the abandonment of people. For all their humiliation and insult, there is a way out for them in faith, repentance, humility and forgiveness of each other. Dostoevsky's greatest merit is that he showed surprisingly clearly that if there is no God, then there is no man.

On the one hand, Dostoevsky predicts what will happen in the last times. Life without God is complete disintegration. On the other hand, he so vividly describes sin, paints it so, as if drawing the reader into it. It makes vice not devoid of scope, charm. The love of a Russian person to look into the abyss, about which Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky speaks so enthusiastically, turned into a fall into this abyss for a person.

“Camus and Gide called Dostoevsky their teacher because they liked to consider how deep a person can fall. Dostoevsky's heroes are playing a dangerous game, posing the question: "Can I or not cross the line that separates man from demons?" Camus oversteps this: there is no life, there is no death, there is nothing if there is no God. Existentialists are all admirers of Dostoevsky without God. “Dostoevsky once wrote that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted.” This is the starting point of existentialism (late Latin "existence"). In fact, everything is permitted if God does not exist, and therefore a person is abandoned, he has nothing to rely on either in himself or outside. First of all, he has no excuses. Indeed, if existence precedes essence, nothing can be explained by reference to once and for all given human nature. In other words, “there is no determinism”, a person is free, a person is freedom.

On the other hand, if there is no God, we have no moral values ​​or precepts before us to justify our actions. Thus, neither behind ourselves, nor in front of us - in the bright realm of values ​​- we have neither excuses nor apologies. We are alone and we have no apologies. This is what I put into words: man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself; and yet free, because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Thus, existentialism gives each person the possession of his being and puts on him the full responsibility for existence.

In this regard, two main areas of existentialism have emerged in world philosophical thought - Christian and atheistic - they are united by only one conviction that existence precedes essence. Let us leave beyond the scope of the study the problems that are of interest to atheist existentialists, and pay attention to the Christian direction, to which Russian philosophy includes the works of Berdyaev, Rozanov, Solovyov, Shestov.

At the center of Russian religious existentialism is the problem of human freedom. Through the concept of transcending - going beyond the limits - domestic philosophers come to religious transcendence, which, in turn, leads them to the conviction that true freedom is in God, and God himself is the way out of limits.

It was inevitable for Russian existentialists to turn to the legacy of Dostoevsky. As a philosophical trend, existentialism arose at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, Germany, France and a number of other European countries. The main question that philosophers asked was the question of the freedom of human existence - one of the main ones for Dostoevsky. He anticipated a number of ideas of existentialism, including the individual honor and dignity of a person, and his freedom as the most important thing on earth. Spiritual experience, Dostoevsky’s extraordinary ability to penetrate into the innermost of man and nature, knowledge of “what has never happened before” made the writer’s work a truly inexhaustible source that fed Russian philosophical thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The work of the existentialists carries a tragic breakdown. If freedom is dearer to a person than anything in the world, if it is his last “essence”, then it also turns out to be a burden, which is very difficult to bear. Freedom, leaving a person alone with himself, reveals only chaos in his soul, exposes its darkest and lowest movements, that is, turns a person into a slave of passions, brings only painful suffering. Freedom led man to the path of evil. Evil became her test.

But Dostoevsky in his works overcomes this evil “by the power of love emanating from him, he dispersed all darkness with streams of psychic light, and as in the famous words about “the sun rising over the evil and the good” - he also broke down the partitions of good and evil and again felt nature and the world of the innocent, even in their very evil.

Freedom opens up space for demonism in a person, but it can also elevate the angelic principle in him. There is a dialectic of evil in freedom movements, but there is also a dialectic of good in them. Isn't this the meaning of the need for suffering through which (often through sin) this dialectic of the good is set in motion?

Dostoevsky is interested in and reveals not only sin, depravity, selfishness and the "demonic" element in man in general, but no less deeply reflected the movements of truth and goodness in the human soul, the "angelic" principle in him. Throughout his life, Dostoevsky did not depart from this "Christian naturalism" and faith in the hidden, not obvious, but genuine "perfection" of human nature. All Dostoevsky's doubts about man, all the revelations of chaos in him, are neutralized by the writer's conviction that there is a great power hidden in man that saves him and the world - the only grief is that humanity does not know how to use this power.

A kind of conclusion suggests itself that it was not so much God who tormented and tested man as it was man himself who tormented and tested God - in his reality and in his depth, in his fatal crimes, in his bright deeds and good deeds.

The purpose of this work is an attempt to highlight the cross-cutting themes of the late works of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (the themes of freedom, existence, death and immortality of a person) and determine their significance (in the interpretation of Dostoevsky) for the Russian existentialist philosophers Solovyov, Rozanov, Berdyaev, Shestov.

CHAPTER 1. "Suicide with a loophole": The image of Ippolit Terentyev.

1.1. The image of Hippolyte and his place in the novel.

The idea of ​​the novel "The Idiot" came to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky in the autumn of 1867, and in the process of working on it, it underwent serious changes. At the beginning, the central character - the "idiot" - was conceived as a morally ugly, evil, repulsive person. But the original version did not satisfy Dostoevsky, and from the end of the winter of 1867 he began to write a "different" novel: Dostoevsky decides to put into practice his "favorite" idea - to portray "quite beautiful person". How he succeeded - for the first time readers could see in the journal "Russian Messenger" for 1868.

Ippolit Terentyev, who interests us more than all other characters in the novel, belongs to the group of young people, the characters of the novel, whom Dostoevsky himself described in one of his letters as "modern positivists from the most extreme youth" (XXI, 2; 120). Among them: the "boxer" Keller, Lebedev's nephew - Doktorenko, the imaginary "son of Pavlishchev" Antip Burdovsky and Ippolit Terentyev himself.

Lebedev, expressing the thought of Dostoevsky himself, says about them: “... they are not exactly nihilists ... Nihilists are still sometimes knowledgeable people, even scientists, but these ones went further, sir, because they are primarily businesslike, sir. These are, in fact, some of the consequences of nihilism, but not in a direct way, but by hearsay and indirectly, and they do not declare themselves in some article, but directly in deeds” (VIII; 213).

According to Dostoevsky, which he repeatedly expressed in letters and notes, the "nihilistic theories" of the sixties, denying religion, which in the eyes of the writer was the only solid foundation of morality, open wide scope for various vacillations of thought among young people. The growth of crime and immorality Dostoevsky explained by the development of these same revolutionary "nihilistic theories."

Parody images of Keller, Doktorenko, Burdovsky are opposed to the image of Hippolyte. "Rebellion" and Terentiev's confession reveal what Dostoevsky himself, in the ideas of the younger generation, was inclined to recognize as serious and worthy of attention.

Hippolyte is by no means a comical figure. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky entrusted him with the mission of an ideological opponent of Prince Myshkin. Besides the prince himself, Ippolit is the only character in the novel who has a complete and integral philosophical and ethical system of views, a system that Dostoevsky himself does not accept and tries to refute, but which he takes with complete seriousness, showing that Ippolit's views are stage of spiritual development of the individual.

As it turns out, there was a moment in the life of the prince when he experienced the same thing as Hippolyte. However, the difference is that for Myshkin, Ippolit's conclusions became a transitional moment on the path of spiritual development to another, higher (from Dostoevsky's point of view) stage, while Ippolit himself lingered on the stage of thinking, which only exacerbates the tragic questions of life, without giving answers to them (See about this: IX; 279).

L.M. Lotman in his work “Dostoevsky's novel and Russian legend” indicates that “Ippolit is the ideological and psychological antipode of Prince Myshkin. The young man understands more clearly than others that the very personality of the prince is a miracle. “I will say goodbye to Man,” says Hippolyte before attempting suicide (VIII, 348). Despair in the face of inevitable death and the lack of moral support to overcome despair makes Ippolit seek support from Prince Myshkin. The young man trusts the prince, he is convinced of his truthfulness and kindness. In it, he seeks compassion, but immediately avenges his weakness. “I don’t need your good deeds, I won’t accept anything from anyone, nothing from anyone!” (VIII, 249).

Hippolyte and the prince are victims of "unreason and chaos", the causes of which are not only social life and society, but also in nature itself. Hippolyte - terminally ill, doomed to an early death. He is aware of his strengths, aspirations and cannot reconcile himself with the meaninglessness that he sees in everything around him. This tragic injustice causes indignation and protest of the young man. Nature appears to him as a dark and meaningless force; in a dream described in a confession, nature appears to Hippolytus in the form of "a terrible animal, some kind of monster, in which something fatal lies" (VIII; 340).

The suffering caused by social conditions is secondary for Hippolytus in comparison with the suffering that the eternal contradictions of nature inflict on him. To a young man wholly occupied with the thought of his inevitable and senseless death, the most terrible manifestation of injustice seems to be the inequality between healthy and sick people, and by no means between rich and poor. All people in his eyes are divided into healthy (happy minions of fate), whom he painfully envies, and sick (offended and robbed by life), to whom he refers himself. It seems to Hippolytus that if he were healthy, this alone would make his life full and happy. “Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, how I deliberately wished that I, eighteen years old, barely dressed, would suddenly be thrown out into the street and left completely alone, without an apartment, without work, ... without a single person I knew in a huge city, .. but healthy, and then I would show ... ”(VIII; 327).

The way out of such mental suffering, according to Dostoevsky, can only be given by faith, only that Christian forgiveness that Myshkin preaches. It is significant that both Ippolit and the prince are both seriously ill, both rejected by nature. “Both Ippolit and Myshkin in the depiction of the writer proceed from the same philosophical and ethical premises. But from these identical premises they draw opposite conclusions.

What Ippolit thought and felt is familiar to Myshkin not from outside, but from his own experience. What Hippolytus expressed in a sharpened, conscious and distinct form, “dumbly and dumbly” worried the prince at one of the past moments of his life. But, unlike Hippolytus, he managed to overcome his suffering, achieve inner clarity and reconciliation, and his faith and Christian ideals helped him in this. The prince and Hippolyta urged to turn from the path of individualistic indignation and protest to the path of meekness and humility. “Pass past us and forgive us our happiness!” - the prince answers the doubts of Hippolytus (VIII; 433). Spiritually separated from other people and suffering from this separation, Ippolit can, according to Dostoevsky, overcome this separation only by "forgiving" other people their superiority and humbly accepting the same Christian forgiveness from them.

Two elements are fighting in Hippolyte: the first is pride (pride), selfishness, which do not allow him to rise above his grief, become better and live for others. Dostoevsky wrote that “it is by living for others around you, pouring out your kindness and the work of your heart on them, that you will become an example” (XXX, 18). And the second element is the true, personal "I", yearning for love, friendship and forgiveness. “And I dreamed that all of them would suddenly spread their arms and take me into their arms and ask me for forgiveness in some way, and I from them” (VIII, 249). Hippolyte is tormented by his ordinariness. He has a "heart", but no mental strength. “Lebedev understood that Ippolit’s despair and dying curses cover up the tender, loving soul seeking and not finding reciprocity. In penetration into the "secret secret" of a person, he alone caught up with Prince Myshkin.

Hippolyte painfully seeks the support and understanding of other people. The stronger his physical and moral suffering, the more he needs people who are able to understand and treat him like a human being.

But he does not dare to admit to himself that he is tormented by his own loneliness, that the main reason for his suffering is not illness, but the absence of human relationship and attention from others around him. He looks at the suffering caused to him by loneliness as a shameful weakness, humiliating him, unworthy of him as a thinking person. Constantly looking for support from other people, Hippolytus hides this noble desire under a false mask of self-indulgent pride and a feigned-cynical attitude towards himself. Dostoevsky presented this "pride" as the main source of Ippolit's suffering. As soon as he reconciles himself, renounces his "pride", courageously admits to himself that he needs brotherly communication with other people, Dostoevsky is sure, and his suffering will end by itself. "The true life of a person is accessible only to dialogic penetration into it, to which it itself responds and freely reveals itself."

About what Dostoevsky gave to the image of Ippolit great importance, say the original intentions of the writer. In Dostoevsky's archival notes we can read: “Hippolit is the main axis of the entire novel. He even takes possession of the prince, but, in essence, does not notice that he will never be able to take possession of him ”(IX; 277). In the original version of the novel, Ippolit and Prince Myshkin had to solve the same questions related to the fate of Russia in the future. Moreover, Ippolit was portrayed by Dostoevsky as either strong, or weak, or rebellious, or voluntarily resigned. Some complex of contradictions remained in Hippolyta at the will of the writer and in the final version of the novel.

1.2. Ippolit Terentiev: "a lost soul".

The loss of faith in eternal life, according to Dostoevsky, is fraught with justification not only for any immoral acts, but also with the denial of the very meaning of existence. This idea was also reflected in Dostoevsky's articles and in his Diary of a Writer (1876). “It seemed to me,” writes Dostoevsky, “that I had clearly expressed the formula of a logical suicide, that I had found it. Belief in immortality does not exist for him, he explains this at the very beginning. Little by little, with his thought about his own aimlessness and hatred for the muteness of the surrounding inertia, he comes to the inevitable conviction of the absolute absurdity of human existence on Earth” (XXIV, 46-47). Dostoevsky understands the logical suicide and respects in him his search and torment. “My suicide is precisely a passionate spokesman for his idea, that is, the need for suicide, and not an indifferent and not a cast-iron person. He really suffers and suffers ... It is too obvious to him that he cannot live and - he knows too well that he is right that it is impossible to refute him ”(XXV, 28).

Almost any character of Dostoevsky (Ippolit all the more), as a rule, acts at the very limit of human capabilities inherent in him. He is almost always in the grip of passion. This is a hero with a restless soul. We see Hippolytus in the vicissitudes of the most acute internal and external struggle. For him, always, at every moment, too much is at stake. That is why the "man of Dostoevsky", according to M.M. Bakhtin, often acts and speaks "with caution", "with a loophole" (that is, he reserves the possibility of a "reverse move"). The failed suicide of Hippolytus is nothing more than a "suicide with a loophole."

This idea was correctly defined by Myshkin. Answering Aglaya, who suggests that Ippolit wanted to shoot himself only so that she would later read his confession, he says: “That is, this is ... how can I tell you? It's very hard to say. Only he probably wanted everyone to surround him and tell him that he was very loved and respected, and everyone would beg him very much to stay alive. It may very well be that he had you in mind most of all, because at such a moment he mentioned you ... although, perhaps, he himself did not know what he had in mind ”(VIII, 354).

This is by no means a rough calculation, this is precisely the "loophole" that Hippolytus' will leaves and which confuses his attitude towards himself to the same extent as his attitude towards others. And the prince correctly guesses this: “... besides, maybe he didn’t think at all, but only wanted this ... he wanted to meet people for the last time, earn their respect and love.” (VIII, 354). Therefore, the voice of Hippolytus has some internal incompleteness. It is not for nothing that his last words (what the outcome should be according to his plan) and in fact turned out to be not quite the last, since the suicide did not succeed.

Dostoevsky introduces us to a new type of double: both torturer and martyr. Here is how V.R. Pereverzev writes about him: “The type of philosophizing double, a double who raised the question of the relationship between the world and man, first appears before us in the person of one of the minor characters in the novel The Idiot by Ippolit Terentyev.” Self-love and self-hatred, pride and self-spitting, torment and self-torture are only a new expression of this fundamental split.

A person is convinced that reality does not correspond to his ideals, which means that he can demand a different life, which means that he has the right to blame the world and rage against it. In contradiction with the hidden attitude towards recognition by others, which determines the whole tone and style of the whole, are Hippolytus' open proclamations that determine the content of his confession: independence from another's court, indifference to it and manifestation of self-will. “I don’t want to leave,” he says, “without leaving a word in response, — a free word, not a forced one, — not for justification, — oh, no! I have no one and nothing to ask for forgiveness - but this way, because I myself want it” (VIII, 342). The whole image of Hippolytus is built on this contradiction, each of his thoughts, each word is determined by it.

With this “personal” word of Hippolytus about himself, the ideological word, which is addressed to the universe, is addressed with protest: the expression of this protest should be suicide. His thought about the world develops in the form of a dialogue with a higher power that once offended him.

Having reached the "limit of shame" in the consciousness of his own "insignificance and impotence", Ippolit decided not to recognize anyone's power over himself - and for this, to take his own life. “Suicide is the only thing that I can still have time to start and finish at my own will” (VIII, 344).

For Hippolyte, suicide is a protest against the senselessness of nature, a protest of the "pathetic creature" against the omnipotent blind, hostile force, which is for Hippolyte the world around him, in the process of collision with which Dostoevsky's hero is. He decides to shoot himself at the first rays of the sun in order to express his main thought: “I will die directly looking at the source of strength and life, and I will not want this life” (VIII, 344). His suicide must be an act of supreme self-will, for by his death Hippolytus wants to exalt himself. He does not accept the philosophy of Myshkin because of its basic principle - the recognition of the decisive role of humility. “They say that humility is a terrible force” (VIII, 347) - he noted in a confession, and he does not agree with this. Rebellion against the "nonsense of nature" is the opposite of recognizing humility as a "terrible force." According to Dostoevsky, only religion can give a way out of the torment and suffering experienced by Ippolit, only that humility and Christian forgiveness that Prince Myshkin preaches. V.N. Zakharov presented his thoughts on this topic: “Dostoevsky’s library had a translation of the book of Thomas of Kempis “On the Imitation of Christ”, published with a preface and notes by the translator K. Pobedonostsev in 1869. The title of the book reveals one of the cornerstone commandments of Christianity: everyone can repeat the redemptive path of Christ, everyone can change their image - be transformed, everyone can discover their divine and human essence. And Dostoevsky resurrect " dead Souls”, but the “immortal”, forgetful of God, soul dies. In his works, a “great sinner” can be resurrected, but a “real underground sinner” would not be corrected, whose confession is not allowed by a “rebirth of convictions” - repentance and atonement.

Both Ippolit and Myshkin are seriously ill, both equally rejected by nature, but unlike Ippolit, the prince did not freeze at the stage of that tragic fragmentation and discord with himself, on which the young man stands. Hippolyte failed to overcome his suffering, failed to achieve inner clarity. Clarity and harmony with himself gave the prince his religious, Christian ideals.

1.3. Hippolytus' rebellion.

The rebellion of Ippolit Terentyev, which found expression in his confession and intention to kill himself, is polemically directed against the ideas of Prince Myshkin and Dostoevsky himself. According to Myshkin, compassion, which is the main and, perhaps, the only "law of being" of all mankind and "single goodness" can lead to the moral rebirth of people and, in the future, to social harmony.

Hippolytus, on the other hand, has his own view on this: “single goodness” and even the organization of “public alms” do not solve the issue of individual freedom.

Consider the motives that led Hippolytus to "rebellion", the highest manifestation of which was to be suicide. In our opinion, there are four of them.

The first motive, which is only outlined in The Idiot, and will continue in Possessed, is a rebellion for the sake of happiness. Hippolyte says that he would like to live for the sake of the happiness of all people and for the “proclaiming of the truth”, that only a quarter of an hour would be enough for him to speak and convince everyone. He does not deny the "single good", but if for Myshkin it is a means of organizing, changing and reviving society, then for Ippolit this measure does not solve the main issue - the freedom and well-being of mankind. He accuses people of their poverty: if they put up with such a situation, then they themselves are to blame, they were defeated by "blind nature." He firmly believes that not everyone is capable of rebellion. This is only for strong people.

From here arises the second motive of rebellion and suicide as its manifestation - to declare one's will to protest. Only the chosen, strong personalities are capable of such an expression of will. Having come to the conclusion that it is he, Ippolit Terentyev, who can do this, he “forgets” the original goal (the happiness of people and his own) and sees the acquisition of personal freedom in the very expression of will. Will, self-will become both a means and an end. “Oh, be sure that Columbus was happy not when he discovered America, but when he discovered it ... The point is in life, in one life, in discovering it, uninterrupted and eternal, and not at all in discovery!” (VIII; 327). For Hippolytus, the results that his actions can lead to are no longer important, the very process of action, protest, is important for him, it is important to prove that he can, that he has the will to do so.

Since the means (will) also becomes the end, it is no longer important what to do and in what way to show the will. But Hippolyte is limited in time (the doctors “gave” him a few weeks) and he decides that: “suicide is the only thing that I can still have time to start and finish of my own free will” (VIII; 344).

The third motive of rebellion is disgust at the very idea of ​​gaining freedom through the will, which takes on ugly forms. In a nightmare, life, all surrounding nature are presented to Hippolytus in the form of a disgusting insect, from which it is difficult to hide. Everything around is a continuous “mutual appearance”. Hippolyte concludes: if life is so disgusting, then life is not worth living. This is not only a rebellion, but also a surrender to life. These beliefs of Ippolit become even more solid after he saw the painting by Hans Holbein "Christ in the tomb" in Rogozhin's house. “When you look at this corpse of a tortured man, one special and curious question arises: if such a corpse (and it certainly should have been exactly like this) was seen by all his disciples, his main future apostles, saw the women who followed him and stood at the cross, all who believed in him and adored him, then how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise again? .. Nature seems to be looking at this picture in the form of some huge, implacable, dumb beast ... ", which swallowed up "deafly and insensibly a great and priceless creature, which alone was worth all of nature and all its laws" (VIII, 339).

This means that there are laws of nature that are stronger than God, who allows such mockery of his best creatures - people.

Hippolyte asks the question: how to become stronger than these laws, how to overcome the fear of them and of their highest manifestation - death? And he comes to the idea that suicide is the very means that can overcome the fear of death and thereby get out of the power of blind nature and circumstances. The idea of ​​suicide, according to Dostoevsky, is a logical consequence of atheism - the denial of God and immortality. The Bible repeatedly says that “the beginning of wisdom, morality, and obedience to the law is the fear of God. At the same time, this is not about a simple emotion of fear, but about the incommensurability of two such quantities as God and man, and also about the fact that the latter is obliged to recognize the unconditional authority of God and His right to undivided power over himself. And we are talking by no means about the fear of the afterlife, hellish torments.

Hippolytus does not take into account the most important and fundamental idea of ​​Christianity - the body is only a vessel for the immortal soul, the basis and purpose of human existence on earth - love and faith. “The covenant that Christ left to people is a covenant of self-sacrificing love. There is neither painful humiliation nor exaltation in it: “I give you a new commandment, love one another, as I have loved you” (John XIII, 34). But in Hippolyte's heart there is no faith, no love, and the only hope is for a revolver. Therefore, he suffers and suffers. But suffering and torment should lead a person to repentance and humility. In the case of Hippolytus, his confession-self-execution is not repentance, because Hippolytus still remains closed in his own pride (pride). He is not able to ask for forgiveness, and, consequently, he cannot forgive others, he cannot sincerely repent.

Ippolit's rebellion and his surrender to life are comprehended by him as something even more necessary, when the very idea of ​​gaining freedom through a declaration of will in practice takes on ugly forms in Rogozhin's actions.

“One of the functions of the image of Rogozhin in the novel is precisely to be the “double” of Ippolit in bringing his idea of ​​will to its logical conclusion. When Ippolit begins reading his confession, Rogozhin from the very beginning alone understands his main idea: “There is a lot of talk,” said Rogozhin, who was silent all the time. Ippolit looked at him, and when their eyes met, Rogozhin grinned bitterly and biliously and slowly said: “This is not the way this object should be processed, lad, not like this ...” (VIII; 320).

Rogozhin and Ippolit are brought together by the force of protest, manifested in the desire to declare their will. The difference between them lies in the fact that, in our opinion, one declares it in an act of suicide, and the other - murder. Rogozhin for Ippolit is also a product of an ugly and terrible reality, it is precisely for this that he is unpleasant to him, which aggravates the thought of suicide. “This particular case, which I described in such detail,” Ippolit says of Rogozhin’s visit during delirium, “was the reason that I completely“ decided ”... You can’t stay in a life that takes such strange, offending me forms. This ghost humiliated me" (VIII; 341). However, this motive for suicide as an act of "rebellion" is not the main one.

The fourth motive is connected with the idea of ​​theomachism, and here it becomes, in our opinion, the main one. It is closely connected with the above motives, prepared by them and follows from reflections on the existence of God and immortality. It was here that Dostoevsky's reflections on logical suicide had an effect. If there is no God and immortality, then the path to suicide (and murder, and other crimes) is open, such is the position of the writer. The thought of God is needed as a moral ideal. He is gone - and we are witnessing the triumph of the principle "after me - even a flood", taken by Hippolytus as an epigraph for his confession.

According to Dostoevsky, this principle can only be opposed by faith - a moral ideal, and faith without evidence, without reasoning. But the rebel Hippolytus opposes this, he does not want to blindly believe, he wants to understand everything logically.

Hippolytus rebels against the need to humble oneself before the circumstances of life only because this is all in the hands of God and everything will pay off in the next world. “Is it really impossible to just eat me without demanding praise from me for what ate me?”, “Why did my humility take place?” - the hero is indignant (VIII; 343-344). Moreover, the main thing that deprives a person of freedom, according to Hippolytus, and makes him a toy in the hands of blind nature, is death, which will come sooner or later, but it is not known when it will be. A person obediently must wait for it, not freely disposing of the term of his life. For Hippolyte, this is unbearable: “... who, in the name of what right, in the name of what motive, would take it into his head to challenge my right now for these two or three weeks of my term?” (VIII; 342). Hippolyte wants to decide for himself how long to live and when to die.

Dostoevsky believes that these claims of Ippolit follow logically from his disbelief in the immortality of the soul. The young man wonders: how to become stronger than the laws of nature, how to overcome the fear of them and their highest manifestation - death? And Hippolyte comes to the idea that suicide is the very means that can overcome the fear of death and thereby get out of the power of blind nature and circumstances. The idea of ​​suicide, according to Dostoevsky, is a logical consequence of atheism - the denial of immortality, the disease of the soul.

It is very important to note the place in Hippolytus's confession where he deliberately draws attention to the fact that his idea of ​​suicide, his "main" conviction, does not depend on his illness. “Let the one who falls into the hands of my “Explanation” and who has the patience to read it, consider me a lunatic or even a schoolboy, or, most likely, a sentenced to death ... I declare that my reader will be mistaken and that my conviction is completely regardless of my death sentence" (VIII; 327). Apparently, one should not exaggerate the fact of Hippolyte's illness, as, for example, A.P. Skaftymov did: “Hippolytus' consumption plays the role of that reagent that should serve as a developer of the given properties of his spirit ... a tragedy of moral inferiority was needed ... resentment ".

Thus, in Hippolytus' rebellion, his denial of life is undeniably consistent and irresistible.

CHAPTER 2. Transformation of the image of a "funny man": from a logical suicide to a preacher.

2.1. "The dream of a funny man" and its place in the "Diary

writer."

For the first time, the fantastic story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" was published in the "Diary of a Writer" in April 1877 (an early draft dates from approximately the first half of April, the second - at the end of April). It is interesting to note that the hero of this story - "a funny man", as he characterizes himself already in the first line of the narrative - had his dream in "last November", namely November 3, and last November, that is, in November 1876, in the "Diary of a Writer" another fantastic story was published - "A Meek" (about an untimely lost young life). Coincidence? But be that as it may, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" develops philosophical theme and solves the ideological problem of the story "The Meek One". These two stories include another one - "Bobok" - and our attention is presented to the original cycle of fantastic stories published on the pages of the Writer's Diary.

Note that in 1876, on the pages of the Writer's Diary, a confession of a suicide "out of boredom" called "The Sentence" also appeared.

The "Sentence" gives the confession of a suicidal atheist who suffers from a lack of higher meaning in his life. He is ready to give up the happiness of a temporary existence, because he is sure that tomorrow "all mankind will turn into nothing, into the former chaos" (XXIII, 146). Life becomes meaningless and unnecessary if it is temporary and everything ends with the disintegration of matter: "... our planet is not eternal and the term for humanity is the same moment as for me" (XXIII, 146). Possible future harmony will not save us from corroding cosmic pessimism. The "logical suicide" thinks: "And no matter how sensibly, joyfully, righteously and holily humanity settles down on earth, destruction is still inevitable", "all this will also equate tomorrow to the same zero" (XXIII; 147). For a person who recognizes in himself a spiritually free eternal principle, life that arose according to some omnipotent, dead laws of nature is insulting ...

This suicide - a consistent materialist - proceeds from the fact that it is not consciousness that creates the world, but nature created it and its consciousness. And this is what he cannot forgive nature, what right did she have to create him "conscious", that is, "suffering"? And in general, wasn’t man created in the form of some impudent test to see if such a creature could get along on earth?

And the “suicide from boredom”, citing sufficiently convincing logical arguments, decides: since he cannot destroy the nature that produced him, he destroys himself alone “only from boredom can endure a tyranny in which there is no one to blame” (XXIII; 148). According to E. Hartmann, "the desire for an individual denial of the will is just as absurd and aimless, even more absurd than suicide." He considered the end of the world process to be necessary and inevitable due to the internal logic of its development, and religious grounds do not play a role here. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, on the contrary, argued that a person is not able to live if he does not have faith in God and in the immortality of the soul.

Such was Dostoevsky's thought at the end of 1876, and six months after the "Sentence" he publishes the fantastic story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" and in it recognizes the possibility of a "golden age of mankind" on earth.

As for the genre, Dostoevsky "filled the story with deep philosophical sense, gave it psychological expressiveness and serious ideological significance. He proved that the story is capable of solving such problems of high genres (poems, tragedies, novels, short stories) as the problem of moral choice, conscience, truth, the meaning of life, the place and destiny of a person. Anything could become a story - any life situation or incident - from a love story to a hero's dream.

2.2. Analysis of the image of a "funny person".

The "ridiculous man" - the hero of the story we are considering - "put" himself to shoot himself, in other words - decided to commit suicide. A person loses faith in himself in God, he is seized by longing and indifference: “In my soul, a longing grew for one circumstance that was already infinitely higher than all of me: it was this one conviction that befell me that everything in the world is all the same ... I I suddenly felt that it would be all the same to me whether the world existed or if there was nothing anywhere...” (XXV; 105).

The disease of time is a disease of the spirit and soul: the absence of a “higher idea” of existence. This is also characteristic of the pan-European crisis of traditional religiosity. And from it, from this very “higher idea”, from faith comes the entire higher meaning and significance of life, the very desire to live. But in order to search for meaning and idea, one must be aware of the necessity of this search. In a letter to A.N. Maikov, Dostoevsky himself noted (March, 1870): “The main question ... is the same one that I have been tormented consciously and unconsciously all my life - the existence of God” (XXI, 2; 117). In a notebook of 1880-1881, he spoke of his faith, which had gone through great trials (XXVII; 48, 81). The "ridiculous man" does not entertain the thought of such quests.

The ideas of this “great longing” seem to be in the air, they live and spread, multiply according to laws incomprehensible to us, they are contagious and know no boundaries or classes: the longing inherent in a highly educated and developed mind can suddenly be transmitted to an illiterate, rude and never cared about anything. What unites these people is the loss of faith in the immortality of the human soul.

Suicide, with disbelief in immortality, becomes an inevitable necessity for such a person. Immortality, promising eternal life, firmly binds a person to the earth, no matter how paradoxical it may sound.

It would seem that a contradiction arises: if there is another life besides earthly life, then why cling to earthly life? The whole point is that with faith in his immortality, a person comprehends the entire rational purpose of his stay on sinful earth. Without this belief in one's own immortality, a person's ties with the earth are torn, become thin and fragile. And the loss of the highest meaning (in the form of that same unconscious longing) undoubtedly leads to suicide - as the only right decision in the current situation.

This unconscious anguish and indifference of the “ridiculous person” is, in essence, a dead balance of will and consciousness - a person is in a state of genuine inertia. Dostoevsky's "underground man" only talked about inertia, but in fact he actively denied the world, and for him the end of history is coming - the voluntary deprivation of his own life. "Funny Man" goes further - he is convinced that life is meaningless, and decides to shoot himself.

The Ridiculous Man is different from Dostoyevsky's other suicides: Kirillov shot himself to prove that he is God; Kraft committed suicide out of disbelief in Russia; Hippolyte tried to take his own life out of hatred for "blind and insolent" nature; Svidrigailov could not bear his own abomination; the "ridiculous person" cannot bear the psychological and moral weight of solipsism.

“I shoot myself,” the hero of the story reflects, “and there will be no peace, at least for me. Not to mention the fact that, perhaps, there will really be nothing for anyone after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness fades away, will fade away immediately, like a ghost, as an accessory of my consciousness alone, and will be abolished, for, maybe this world and all these people - I myself am alone ”(XXV, 108).

The “ridiculous man” could join the pessimistic aphorism of the Kierkegaardian aesthetic: “how empty, insignificant life is! They bury a person, escort the coffin to the grave, throw a handful of earth into it; one goes there in a carriage and returns in a carriage, comforting oneself with the fact that there is still a long life ahead. What exactly is 7-10 years? Why not finish it right away, not everyone stay in the cemetery, casting lots - whose lot will be the misfortune of being the last and throwing the last handful of earth on the grave of the last deceased? The inner emptiness of such a philosophy of indifference led the “ridiculous person” to the decision to commit suicide, and along with the world. In the November issue of the "Diary of a Writer" for 1876, in his "Unfounded Statement", Dostoevsky says: "... without faith in one's soul and in its immortality, the existence of a person is unnatural, unthinkable and unbearable" (XXIV; 46). Having lost faith in God and in immortality, a person comes to the inevitable conviction of the absolute absurdity of the existence of mankind on earth. In this case, a thinking and feeling person will inevitably think about suicide. “I will not and cannot be happy under the condition of a zero that threatens tomorrow” (XXIV; 46), says the self-murdering atheist in Unfounded Statements. Here there is something to despair of, and logical suicide can turn into a real one - there are many such cases.

"Funny Man" did not fulfill his intention. Suicide was prevented by a beggar girl who met him on the way home. She called him, asked for help, but the "funny man" drove the girl away and went to his "fifth floor", in a poor little room with an attic window. In this room he usually spent his evenings and nights on end, indulging in vague, incoherent and unaccountable thoughts.

He took out a revolver from a drawer and placed it in front of him. But then the “funny man” thought about the girl - why did he not respond to her call? And he didn’t help her because he “put” to shoot herself in two hours, and in this case, neither the feeling of pity nor the feeling of shame after the meanness done can matter ...

But now, sitting in an armchair in front of the revolver, he realized that "it's not all the same", that the girl is a pity. “I remember that I felt sorry for her very much, to the point of some kind of even strange pain, and quite even incredible in my position ... and I was very annoyed, as I had not been for a long time” (XXV; 108).

A moral gap formed in the mind of the “ridiculous person”: his ideally built concept of indifference cracked at the very moment when, it would seem, it should have triumphed.

2.3. The secrets of the "funny man's" dream.

He fell asleep, "which had never ... happened before, at the table, in armchairs" (XXV; 108).

It should be noted that for the hero his dream is the same reality as reality, he lives his dream really and realistically. Not every dream is fantasy. Many of them lie within the real or probable, there is nothing impossible in them. "The dreamer, even knowing that he is dreaming, believes in the reality of what is happening." Dostoevsky has dreams that remain only dreams. The psychological content comes to the fore in them, they have an important compositional significance, but do not create a “second plan”. “In the story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” sleep is introduced “precisely as the possibility of a completely different life, organized according to completely different laws than usual (sometimes just like“ the world inside out ”)” . Life, seen in a dream, alienates ordinary life, makes you understand and evaluate it in a new way (in the light of a different opportunity seen); the dream carries a certain philosophical significance. And the person himself becomes different in a dream, reveals other possibilities in himself (both better and worse), he is tested and tested by sleep. Sometimes a dream is directly constructed as a crowning-debunking of a person and life.

“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” is a story about the hero’s moral insight through sleep, about finding the truth by him. The dream itself can be called actually a fantastic element in the story, but it was born from the heart and mind of the hero, is conditioned by real life and is associated with many concepts. Dostoevsky himself, in a letter to Yu.F. Abaza dated June 15, 1880, wrote: “Let this be a fantastic fairy tale, but the fantastic in art has limits and rules. The fantastic must be in such contact with the real that you must almost believe it” (XXV; 399).

The dream began with quite real (long-awaited for the hero) events - he shot himself, he was buried. Further, he was “taken from the grave by some dark and unknown creature”, and they “ended up in space” (XXV; 110). This “ridiculous man” was lifted by this creature to the very star that he saw in the gap of the clouds when he returned home in the evening. And this star turned out to be a planet, completely similar to our Earth.

Earlier, in the mid-60s, Dostoevsky suggested that the future "heavenly" life could be created on some other planet. And now he transfers the hero of his work to another planet.

Flying up to her "funny man" saw the sun, exactly the same as ours. “Is it possible that such repetitions are possible in the universe, is it really a natural law? .. And if this is the earth there, then is it really the same earth as ours ... exactly the same, unfortunate, poor ...” (XXV; 111), he exclaimed.

But Dostoevsky was by no means interested in the scientific side of the question of repetitions in the Universe. He was interested: is it possible to repeat the moral laws, behavior, psychology, characteristic of the people of the Earth, on other inhabited celestial bodies?

The "Funny Man" ended up on a planet where there was no fall. “It was a land not defiled by the fall, people who did not sin lived on it, they lived in the same paradise in which, according to the legends of all mankind, our forefathers who sinned lived” (XXV; 111).

From a religious point of view, the solution of the question of the purpose of history, of the "golden age" of the happiness of mankind, is inseparable from the history of the fall of man.

What happened on this planet? What did the “funny man” see and what did he experience on it?

“Oh, everything was exactly the same as ours, but it seemed to shine everywhere with some kind of holiday and a great, holy and finally achieved triumph” (XXV; 112).

People on the planet did not experience sadness, because they had nothing to be sad about. Only love reigned there. These people did not have any anguish because their material needs were completely satisfied; in their minds there was no antagonism between the "earthly" (transient) and the "heavenly" (eternal). The consciousness of these happy inhabitants of the "golden age" was characterized by a direct knowledge of the secrets of being.

Religion, in our earthly sense, they did not have, “but they had some kind of vital, living and uninterrupted unity with the Whole of the universe,” and in death they saw “an even greater expansion of contact with the Whole of the universe.” The essence of their religion was "some kind of love for each other, complete and universal" (XXV; 114).

And suddenly all this disappears, explodes, flies into the "black hole": "ridiculous man", who came from the earth, the son of Adam burdened with original sin, overthrew the "golden age"! .. "Yes, yes, it ended with me corrupting all of them! How this could have happened, I don’t know, I don’t remember clearly… I only know that I was the cause of the fall” (XXV; 115).

Dostoevsky is silent about how this could have happened. He confronts us with a fact, and on behalf of the “ridiculous person” he says: “They learned to lie and fell in love with lies and knew the beauty of lies” (XXV; 115). They knew shame and raised it to virtue, they loved sorrow, torment became desirable for them, since truth is achieved only by suffering. Slavery, separation, isolation appeared: wars began, blood flowed ...

“Teachings have appeared calling on everyone to unite again, so that everyone, without ceasing to love themselves more than anyone else, at the same time not interfere with anyone else and thus live together, as if in a harmonious society” (XXV; 117). This idea turned out to be stillborn and gave rise only to bloody wars, during which the "wise" tried to exterminate the "unwise" who did not understand their ideas.

Painfully experiencing his guilt in corrupting and destroying the "golden age" on the planet, the "funny man" wants to atone for it. “I begged them to crucify me on the cross, I taught them how to make a cross. I could not, I was unable to kill myself, but I wanted to accept torment from them, I longed for torment, so that all my blood would be shed in these torments to the drop ”(XXV; 117). The question of atonement for his guilt, of the pangs of conscience, was put before himself and tried to solve it not only by the “ridiculous person”. “The pangs of conscience are more terrible for a person than the external punishment of the state law. And a person, stricken with pangs of conscience, is waiting for punishment as an alleviation of his torment,” N.A. Berdyaev shares his opinion. .

At first, the “funny man” turned out to be a tempting serpent, and then he wished to become a savior-redeemer…

But on that planet-twin of the earth he did not become a likeness-double of Christ: no matter how much he begged to be crucified for the atonement of sin, they only laughed at him, saw him as a holy fool, a madman. Moreover, the residents paradise lost They justified him, “they said that they received only what they themselves desired, and that everything that is now could not have been” (XXV; 117). Sorrow entered his soul, unbearable and painful, such that he felt that death was near.

But then the "funny man" woke up. The planet remained in a state of sin and without hope for redemption and deliverance.

2.4. "Awakening" and the rebirth of the "funny man".

Waking up, he sees a revolver in front of him and pushes it away from him. The irresistible desire to live and ... preach returned to the "ridiculous man".

He raised his hands and appealed to the eternal Truth that was revealed to him: “I saw the truth, and I saw it, and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth ... The main thing is to love others as yourself, that's the main thing, and that's all, absolutely nothing else is needed: you will immediately find how to get settled ”(XXV; 118-119).

After his fantastic journey, the "funny man" is convinced that a "golden age" is possible - a kingdom of goodness and happiness is possible. The guiding star on this complex, winding and painful path is faith in man, in the need for human happiness. And the path to it, as Dostoevsky points out, is incredibly simple - "love your neighbor as yourself."

Love filled the soul of the “ridiculous person”, driving out melancholy and indifference from there. Faith and hope settled in her: “Fate is not fate, but the freedom to choose between good and evil, which is the essence of man. It is not the soul that is cleansed, but the spirit, it is not the passions that are eliminated, but the ideas - through Dionysian absorption or, through the loss of a human face in them - a person is affirmed in them, united with the world by love, who has assumed full responsibility and guilt for the evil of this world. .

A living, genuine attitude to people's lives is measured only by the degree of a person's inner freedom, only by love that transcends the boundaries of reason and reason. Love becomes superintelligent, rising to a sense of inner connection with the whole world. Truth is not born in a test tube and is not proved by a mathematical formula, it exists. And, according to Dostoevsky, truth is such only if it is presented “in the form of confessional self-expression. In the mouth of another ... the same statement would take on a different meaning, a different tone, and would no longer be true.

“I saw the truth - not what I invented with my mind, but I saw, I saw, and its living image filled my soul forever. I saw her in such a complete integrity that I cannot believe that people could not have her ”(XXV; 118).

Newly found love, faith and hope “took” the revolver away from the temple of the “ridiculous man”. N.A. Berdyaev spoke about this “recipe” for suicide: “Suicide as an individual phenomenon is defeated by Christian faith, hope, love.”

Over the course of one night, the “ridiculous person” was reborn from a logical suicide into a deeply and devoutly believing person, in a hurry to do good, bring love and preach the truth revealed to him.

CONCLUSION.

In 1893, Vasily Rozanov wrote in his article “On Dostoevsky”: “What is the general significance of a genius in history? Nothing else than the vastness of spiritual experience, by which he surpasses other people, knowing that which is scattered separately in thousands of them, which is sometimes hidden in the darkest, unspoken characters; knows, finally, and much that has never been experienced by man, and only he, in his immensely rich inner life, has already been tested, measured and evaluated. In our opinion, the undoubted merit of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky lies in the fact that he led many to an understanding of the ideas of Christianity. Dostoevsky makes you think about the most important thing. A thinking person cannot but raise questions about life and death, about the purpose of his stay on earth. Dostoevsky is great because he is not afraid to look into the depths of human existence. He tries to the end to penetrate into the problem of evil, which is acquiring an ever more tragic significance for human consciousness. This problem, in our opinion, is at the source of various types of atheism, and it remains painful until the Truth is revealed to a graciously peaceful person.

Many great writers have touched on this topic, and sometimes more deeply and vividly than philosophers and even theologians. They were a kind of prophets. One must know the depths of evil in order not to build illusions in social or moral terms. And one must know the depth of good in order to resist atheism. We can only agree with our contemporary Archpriest Alexander, according to whom "the greatest of our prophets, the greatest soul, tormented by the question of the confrontation between good and evil, was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky."

The painful atmosphere of Dostoevsky's novels does not depress the reader, does not deprive him of hope. Despite the tragic outcome of the destinies of the main characters, in The Idiot, as in other works of the writer, one can hear a passionate longing for a happy future for mankind. Dostoevsky's negative denouement proved that hopelessness and cynicism are not justified - that evil has been undermined, that the way out, although not yet known, is there, that you need to find it at all costs - and then a ray of dawn will shine.

The hero of Dostoevsky is almost always placed in such a position that he needs a chance for salvation. For the "ridiculous man" this chance was a dream, and for Ippolit Terentyev - a revolver that never fired. Another thing is that the "ridiculous man" took advantage of this chance, and Hippolyte died without coming to an agreement with the world and, above all, with himself.

Unconditional faith and Christian humility are the keys to happiness, Dostoevsky believed. The "ridiculous man" turned out to be able to regain the lost "higher goals" and "the highest meaning of life."

In the end, each hero of Dostoevsky rests on hopelessness, before which he is powerless, as before the deaf “Meyer wall”, about which Ippolit speaks so mystically eloquently. But for Dostoevsky himself, the hopelessness in which his hero finds himself is only a new reason for searching for other means of overcoming it.

It is no coincidence that in all the latest novels of the writer such a large role is played by representatives of the younger generation - young men and children. In The Idiot, the image of Kolya Ivolgin is associated with this idea. Observation of the life of his parents, other people around him, friendship with Prince Myshkin, Aglaya, Ippolit becomes for Kolya a source of spiritual enrichment and growth of his individuality. The tragic experience of the older generation does not pass without a trace for Ivolgin Jr., it makes him think early about choosing his life path.

Reading Dostoevsky, novel after novel, it is as if you are reading a single book about the single path of a single human spirit from the moment of its inception. The works of the great Russian writer seem to capture all the ups and downs of the human personality, understood by him as a whole. All questions of the human spirit appear in all their irresistibility, since its personality is unique and unrepeatable. None of Dostoevsky's works lives on its own, apart from others (the theme of Crime and Punishment, for example, almost directly flows into the theme of The Idiot).

In Dostoevsky we observe the complete fusion of the preacher and the artist: he preaches like an artist, but creates like a preacher. Any brilliant artist tends to depict the behind-the-scenes sides of human souls. Dostoevsky went further here than any of the great realists, without losing his vocation. A writer of an exclusively Russian theme, Dostoevsky plunges his hero, the Russian man, into the abyss of problems that have arisen before man in general throughout his history. On the pages of Dostoevsky's works, the whole history of mankind, human thought and culture comes to life in the refraction of individual consciousness. “In his best, golden pages, Dostoevsky evoked on the reader the dreams of world harmony, the brotherhood of people and peoples, the harmony of the inhabitant of the earth with this earth and sky inhabited by him. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", in "A Writer's Diary", and some passages in the novel "A Teenager" make Dostoevsky feel a heart that not only verbally, but really touched the mystery of these harmonies. Half of Dostoevsky's glory is based on these golden pages of his, just as her other half is on his famous "psychological analysis" ... To a direct and brief question: "Why do you love Dostoevsky so much", "why does Russia honor him so much", everyone will say briefly and almost without thinking: “Why, this is the most insightful person in Russia, and the most loving.” Love and wisdom are the secret of Dostoevsky's greatness.

Probably, in this, in our opinion, the main reason for his worldwide, now ever-increasing fame. And, of course, this is precisely the reason for the interest in the work of Dostoevsky by philosophers of various currents and directions, the main among which, undoubtedly, is the existential current. Dostoevsky's legacy contains all the main questions that have interested and continue to interest philosophers - and the most important question: about being, freedom and the existence of man. “Dostoevsky is the most Christian writer because at the center of it is man, human love and the revelations of the human soul. He is all a revelation of the heart, of human existence, of the heart of Jesus. Dostoevsky discovers a new mystical science of man. Man is not the periphery of being, as with many mystics and metaphysicians, not a transient phenomenon, but the very depth of being, going into the depths of Divine life,” notes N.A. Berdyaev. Dostoevsky is anthropocentric, he is absorbed by man, nothing so excited the writer as man and the movements of his spirit and soul.

The modern world, which has gone through and is going through the greatest socio-historical upheavals, is arranged in such a way that people of current generations are endowed with an unprecedented tendency to look into the most distant, hidden and dark depths of their souls. And a better assistant in this than Dostoevsky cannot be found to this day.

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Prince Myshkin at the Yepanchins. Frame from the movie "The Idiot". Directed by Ivan Pyryev. 1958 RIA News"

Visiting the Epanchins, Prince Myshkin says that after the aggravation of epilepsy, he was sent to Switzerland:

“I remember: the sadness in me was unbearable; I even wanted to cry; I kept wondering and worrying: it had a terrible effect on me that all this was foreign; I understood it. Alien was killing me. I completely awoke from this darkness, I remember, in the evening, in Basel, at the entrance to Switzerland, and I was awakened by the cry of a donkey in the city market. The donkey struck me terribly and for some reason I liked it unusually, and at the same time everything suddenly seemed to clear up in my head.

At this moment, the Yepanchin sisters begin to laugh, explaining that they themselves both saw and heard the donkey. For the inhabitants of Central Russia in the 19th century, the donkey was an outlandish animal. It was possible to find out how it actually looks from books - for example, from descriptions of travels in the Central Asian regions and southern countries. In St. Petersburg, donkeys, along with wild goats and other rare exhibits, were placed in menageries - small mobile or stationary zoos of that time.

But the reading public knew that the donkey is a fool and a symbol of stupidity. From the fables translated from French, the image of a stupid animal migrated to other literary genres and correspondence. Until 1867, the word "donkey" was used exclusively as a curse. Therefore, in the conversation between Myshkin and the princesses, confusion arises. The prince sincerely tells the Yepan-chins about an important event for him, and the young ladies scoff, almost directly calling him a fool - there is no ambiguity in their speech. Myshkin is not offended, in fact, for the first time on the pages of the novel, he endured a direct, undeserved insult.

2. The mystery of the death penalty

While waiting for a reception at the Yepanchins, Prince Myshkin starts a conversation about the death penalty with their valet:

“And before I didn’t know anything here, but now I hear so much new that, they say, whoever knew something, is relearned to recognize it all over again. There is a lot of talk here about the courts.
- Hm! .. Courts. The courts, it is true that the courts. And what, how is it, is it fairer in court or not?
- I do not know. I heard a lot of good things about us. Again, we don't have the death penalty.
- Are they executed there?
- Yes. I saw it in France, in Lyon.”

Further, the prince begins to fantasize about the thoughts of the condemned to death in last minutes before execution. However, in the 1860s, the death penalty existed in Russia. According to the Regulations on Penal and Correctional Punishments of 1866, the death penalty was imposed for such crimes as rebellion against the supreme authority, hiding the fact of arrival from places where the plague is rampant, treason, and an attempt on the emperor. In the same 1866, Dmitry Karakozov, who tried to kill Alexander II, was executed, and Nikolai Ishutin, a member of the revolutionary “Organization” circle, was sentenced to death (though later this punishment was commuted to life imprisonment). Every year, Russian courts sentenced 10-15 people to execution.

Nikolay Ishutin. 1868 oldserdobsk.ru

Ilya Repin. Portrait of Dmitry Karakozov before his execution. 1866 Wikimedia Commons

Of course, the story of Prince Myshkin about the execution and his fantasy about the last minutes of the condemned man is the story of Dostoevsky himself, condemned to death in 1849. The punishment was changed to hard labor, but he had to go through the “last minutes” before his death.

3. The secret of Dr. B-on

Eighteen-year-old young man Ippolit Terentyev is ill with consumption. At the first meeting with Myshkin and other heroes of the novel in Pavlovsk, he tells everyone that he is dying:

“... In two weeks, as I know, I will die ... B-n himself announced to me last week ...”

He later confesses that he lied:

“... B-n didn’t tell me anything and never saw me.”

So why did he tell a lie, who is Bn and why was his opinion so important? Bn is Sergey Petrovich Botkin, one of the most famous Petersburg therapists of that time. In 1860, Botkin defended his dissertation, became a professor, and at the age of 29 headed a therapeutic clinic, opening a scientific laboratory with it. In different years, Herzen, Nekrasov, were treated by him. Dostoevsky also addressed Botkin several times. In 1867, in which the novel takes place, getting an appointment with the famous doctor was not easy. He worked a lot in the clinic, reduced personal practice and received patients along with students, clearly explaining the methods and principles of work.

Sergei Botkin. Around 1874 Fine Art Images/Diomedia

Quite quickly, Botkin gained a reputation as a doctor who never makes mistakes, although colleagues and journalists tried to debunk this image. In 1862, the alleged mistake he made almost became a sensation. A young man was admitted to the clinic, in whom Botkin suspected portal vein thrombosis. At that time, this was a bold assumption - such a disease was confirmed only after an autopsy, and then they did not know how to diagnose and treat thrombosis. The therapist predicted a quick death for the man. Time passed, the patient remained alive, continuing to suffer. He lasted more than 120 days under the constant supervision of Botkin, survived the operation, but then still died. At autopsy, the pathologist removed the portal vein, in which there was a blood clot. Mentioning Botkin in the conversation, Ippolit tries to convince his interlocutors that he will indeed die soon, and to attract their attention.

4. The mystery of the newspaper Indépendance Belge

The main media outlet for The Idiot is the Belgian newspaper Indépendance Belge. Its name is mentioned several times in the novel, and General Ivolgin and Nastasya Filippovna are avid readers of this publication. There is a small conflict scene between these two characters on a newspaper note. The general, who loves to dream up and pass off someone else's story as his own, tells how he threw his fellow traveler's lap dog out of the train, offended by the remark. Nastasya Filippovna says that a few days ago she read about the same case in the newspaper.

Front page of L'Indépendance Belge. August 24, 1866 Bibliotheque royale de Belgique

Indépendance Belge is one of the most popular publications of the time, with a correspondent network throughout Europe, especially in France and Germany, a powerful news block and a sharp leftist stance. It was read in Russia, it was not especially popular Petersburg newspapers referred to it in their publications less frequently than, for example, to publications France, Times or Italia., but in coffee houses of that time - in the 19th century in such establishments there was a selection of periodicals for visitors - you could always find it. Buying at least a cup of coffee, one could get access to foreign newspapers and magazines. So did many students, sometimes ordering one cup for two or three.

Why, of all the newspapers available in Russian Empire, Dostoevsky chose this one? Because he read and loved it. He met Indépendance Belge back in the 1850s in Semipalatinsk, when he left hard labor and entered the military service. Then he became friends with Alexander Yegorovich Wrangel, an official of the Ministry of Justice, a criminal lawyer. From Wrangel, he began to borrow books and newspapers, including the Indépendance Belge. Wrangel also subscribed to the German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, but Dostoevsky read French more confidently. Therefore, it was the Belgian media that then became for him the main source of information about European events. He also read it while working on The Idiot, while abroad, as his wife Anna Grigorievna repeatedly recalled.

5. The secret of eunuchs

We know a little about the Rogozhin family: they are rich St. Petersburg merchants, the head of the family died, leaving two and a half million inheritances, and their house, “big, gloomy, three floors, without any architecture, the color of dirty green”, is located on Gorokhovaya street. On it, Prince Myshkin sees a sign with the inscription "The House of Hereditary Honorary Citizen Rogozhin." The title of honorary citizen freed the inhabitants of the city from recruitment duty, corporal punishment and poll tax. But most importantly, it was a sign of prestige. In 1807, special rules were established for merchants: in order to receive such a title, one had to be in the first guild for 20 years, and then submit a special petition to the Senate. It turns out that the Rogozhins are either a rather old merchant family, or they are extremely successful and do not hesitate to demand honors for themselves.

Even under the grandfather of Parfen Rogozhin, rooms in the house were rented, preaching asceticism and celibacy. The latter was confirmed and consolidated literally by castration - both male and female. The sect existed largely thanks to the patronage of well-known merchant families who valued the eunuchs' business qualities. The sectarians kept money-changing shops, but they were not limited to a simple exchange of money, performing almost the entire possible range of banking operations, including the storage of money. There was no special and strict legislation to regulate such activities, and this opened up scope for gray financial transactions. And thanks to the rejection of all possible passions and bad habits, the eunuchs were reliable partners.

Community of eunuchs in Yakutia. Late XIX- beginning of the 20th century yakutskhistory.net

The connection with the eunuchs can be an indication of both the fact that the Rogozhins’ fortune was partly accumulated through illegal schemes, and why the father of the family was so angry with Parfyon’s son when he spent money on jewelry for Nastasya Filippovna. This is not just a loss of wealth, but also an act in the name of carnal passion.

6. The mystery of the golden brushes

Rogozhin at the beginning of the novel, talking about what happened to their family after the death of their father, swears at his brother and threatens him with criminal prosecution.

«— <...>From the cover of the brocade on the coffin of the parent, at night, the brother cut off cast, golden brushes: “They, they say, what money they cost.” Why, he can go to Siberia for that alone, if I want to, because it is sacrilege. Hey you scarecrow pea! - he turned to the official. - As according to the law: sacrilege?
- Sacrilege! Sacrilege! the official immediately agreed.
- For this to Siberia?
- To Siberia, to Siberia! Immediately to Siberia!”

According to the criminal code of the 19th century, Rogozhin really had the opportunity (albeit a small one) to get rid of a relative and a contender for the inheritance.

Sacrilege, which included the theft of church property, has been considered a crime in Russia since the 18th century. For sacrilege they were exiled to Siberia - the term of exile depended on the nature of the crime. For example, for the theft of an icon from a church, they were given fifteen years, for the theft from a church vault - 6-8 years, etc.

But the coffin of Father Rogozhin, apparently, was in their house in St. Petersburg - so the brother was able to cut off the gold tassels at night. The crime did not take place in a church or in a church building, and therefore the court was not interested in sacrilege at all, but in the subject of theft. And here the main question is when it all happened - before the funeral or after. If after, then the cover is a consecrated object that was used in a church ceremony: circumcision of the hands would turn into hard labor. If before, then with the help of a good lawyer, the brother could get rid of Parfyon's accusations.

7. The mystery of the murder of Nastasya Filippovna

“I covered it with oilcloth, a good American oilcloth, and on top of the oilcloth there was already a sheet, and I put four bottles of Zhdanov’s liquid from the corked one, and now they are standing there,” Rogozhin tells Prince Myshkin. Dostoevsky took the details of this murder from real life.

Dostoevsky used excerpts from the crime chronicle while working on the novel Crime and Punishment. That was the way I worked on The Idiot. Dostoevsky was then abroad and was very worried that he was losing touch with his homeland and the book would not become topical. To make the novel modern and believable Observation of the researcher of Dostoevsky's work, Vera Sergeevna Lyubimova-Dorovatovskaya., he read all the Russian newspapers that came across to him, paying special attention to reports of high-profile incidents.

The heroes of the novel "The Idiot" are actively discussing two criminal cases. The first of them is the murder of six people in Tambov. The offender was an 18-year-old youth Vitold Gorsky, his victims were the Zhemarin family, in which he gave lessons. At the trial, the prosecutors tried to present the crime as political and ideological, but could not prove this version. The second incident is the murder and robbery of a moneylender in Moscow, committed by a 19-year-old student of Moscow University, who did not have enough money for a wedding These two incidents have nothing to do with the plot of The Idiot, but may have interested Dostoevsky in echoes of his previous novel, Crime and Punishment. The writer was worried that readers would not see a connection with reality in his works. In The Idiot, he persistently tries to convince readers and critics that his previous novel was not an empty fantasy..

But the main newspaper borrowing of The Idiot was the murder of Nastasya Filippovna. In 1867, the newspapers reported on the murder of the jeweler Kalmykov in Moscow. It was made by the Moscow merchant Mazurin. Like Rogozhin, after the death of his father, he became the full heir to a huge merchant's fortune and a large house, where he eventually committed his crime. Not knowing what to do with the corpse, the first thing he did was go and buy American oilcloth and Zhdanov's liquid, a special solution that was used to combat strong unpleasant odors and disinfect the air. And if this liquid was a unique product of its kind, then the choice of oilcloths in the shops was quite wide. The fact that both the real killer and Rogozhin choose the American one, which was usually used for furniture upholstery, can be considered a direct reference for readers familiar with the Mazurin case.

By the way, the writer's contemporaries almost never accused him of bloodthirstiness, did not focus on how in detail he describes crimes, and did not admit that he could think over murders at his leisure. Apparently, they immediately solved all the riddles that the writer left for them.

L. MULLER

Tubingen University, Germany

THE IMAGE OF CHRIST IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOVEL "IDIOT"

For "Crime and Punishment" by F. M. Dostoevsky, the image of Christ was of great importance. But, in general, he was given relatively little space in the novel. Only one character is filled with the spirit of Christ and therefore is attached to his healing, saving and life-creating deeds, awakening from death to "living life" - Sonya. The situation is different in the next novel, The Idiot, written in a relatively short period of time, from December 1866 to January 1869, when Dostoevsky was in an extremely difficult financial situation, experiencing an acute shortage of money and constrained by the enslaving terms of writing the novel.

In this work, the hero of the title, the young prince Myshkin, whom many consider an "idiot" is closely connected with the image of Christ. Dostoevsky himself repeatedly emphasized this closeness. In a letter dated January 1, 1868, in the midst of work on the first part of the novel, he writes: “The idea of ​​​​the novel is my old and beloved, but so difficult that for a long time I did not dare to take on it, and if I took it now, it’s definitely because that was in a situation almost desperate.The main idea of ​​the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person.There is nothing more difficult than this in the world, and especially now.<...>The beautiful is the ideal, and the ideal ... is still far from being developed.

What does Dostoevsky mean when he says that the ideal of the beautiful has not yet been worked out? He probably means the following: there are no clearly formulated, substantiated and generally accepted "tablets of values" yet. People are still arguing about what is good and what is evil - humility or pride, love of neighbor or "reasonable selfishness", self-sacrifice or self-affirmation. But one value criterion exists for Dostoevsky: the image of Christ. He is for the writer the embodiment of "positively"

© Muller L., 1998

1 Dostoevsky F. M. Complete works: In 30 volumes. T. 28. Book. 2. L., 1973. S. 251.

or a "perfectly" beautiful person. Thinking of incarnating a "positively beautiful man," Dostoevsky had to take Christ as a model. And so he does.

Prince Myshkin embodies all the blessings of the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the poor in spirit.; Blessed are the meek.; Blessed are the merciful.; Blessed are the pure in heart.; Blessed are the peacemakers." And as if the words of the Apostle Paul about love were said about him: “Love is long-suffering, merciful, love does not envy, love does not exalt itself, does not pride itself, does not behave violently, does not seek its own, is not irritated, does not think evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; covers all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Cor. 13:4-7).

Another feature that connects Prince Myshkin in close ties with Jesus is love for children. Myshkin, too, could have said: "... let the children come to Me, and do not hinder them; for of such is the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14).

All this brings him so close to Christ that many are convinced that Dostoevsky really wanted to recreate the image of Christ, Christ in the 19th century,

in the era of capitalism, in a modern big city, and wanted to show that this new Christ is also doomed to failure in a professed Christian Society XIX century, like the first one, 1800 years ago, in the state of the Roman emperor and the Jewish high priests. Those who understand the novel in this way can refer to Dostoevsky's entry in the outline for The Idiot, which is repeated three times: "The Prince is Christ." But this does not mean at all that Dostoevsky put an equal sign between Myshkin and Christ. After all, he himself said in the letter quoted above: "There is only one positively beautiful face in the world - Christ ..,"2

Prince Myshkin is a follower of Christ, he radiates his spirit, he reveres, he loves Christ, he believes in him, but this is not a new, not newly appeared Christ. He differs from the Christ of the gospels, as well as from the image of him, formed by Dostoevsky, in character, preaching and mode of action. "There can be nothing more courageous and perfect" than Christ, - Dostoevsky wrote to Mrs. Fonvizina after his release from hard labor. Can be named as positive traits Prince Myshkin, anything but these two qualities. The prince lacks courage not only in the sexual sense: he does not have the will to self-affirmation, determination

2 Ibid. 376

where it is needed (namely, which of the two women he loves and who loves him, he wants to marry); because of this inability to make a choice, he incurs a heavy guilt towards these women, a heavy guilt for their death. His end in idiocy is not self-sacrificing innocence, but the result of irresponsible interference in events and intrigues, which he simply cannot resolve. One of his interlocutors was right when he remarked to the prince that he acted differently from Christ. Christ forgave the woman taken in adultery, but he did not recognize her rightness at all and, naturally, did not offer her his hand and heart. Christ does not have this unfortunate substitution and confusion of condescending, compassionate, all-forgiving love with carnal attraction, which leads to the death of Myshkin and both women he loved. Myshkin is in many respects a like-minded person, a disciple, a follower of Christ, but in his human weakness, in his inability to protect himself from the snares of guilt and sin, his ending in an incurable mental illness, of which he himself is guilty, he is infinitely far from the ideal of "positively beautiful man incarnated in Christ.

Jesus and the "great sinner"

If in "Crime and Punishment" Raskolnikov finds his way to Christ through Sonya, then in "The Idiot" this happens with almost all the characters of the novel, whom Prince Myshkin meets in the course of action, and above all with main character, Nastasya Filippovna, grievously suffering under the burden of her past. Seduced in her youth by a rich, enterprising, unscrupulous landowner, for many years in the position of a kept woman, and then abandoned to the mercy of fate by a satiated seducer, she feels herself a sinful creature, rejected, contemptible and unworthy of any respect. Saving love comes from the prince, he proposes to her and says: "... I will consider that you will honor me, and not I. I am nothing, but you suffered and came out of such a pure hell, and this is a lot "3. Nastasya Filippovna does not accept the prince's proposal, but in parting she addresses him these words: "Goodbye, prince, for the first time I saw a man!" (148).

3 Dostoevsky F.M. Idiot // Complete. coll. cit.: In 30 vols. T. 8. L., 1973. P. 138. The following text is cited from this edition with page numbers in brackets.

Since Prince Myshkin, following Christ, bears in himself the image of someone who was a man in the full sense of the word, the prince, in an exceptional way, is a man, the first whom Nastasya Filippovna met in her long-suffering life. Obviously, not without his participation, she acquires a strong spiritual connection with the image of Christ. In one of her passionate letters to her beloved and hated "rival" Aglaya, also beloved by Myshkin, she describes a certain vision of Christ who appeared to her and imagines how she would depict Him in a picture:

Painters paint Christ all according to the gospel legends; I would have written differently: I would have portrayed him alone, - sometimes his students left him alone. I would leave only one small child with him. The child played beside him; maybe he was telling him something in his childish language, Christ listened to him, but now he became thoughtful; his hand involuntarily, obliviously, remained on the bright head of the child. He looks into the distance, into the horizon; a thought as great as the whole world rests in his gaze; sad face. The child fell silent, leaned on his knees and, resting his cheek on his hand, raised his head and looked at him thoughtfully, as children sometimes think. The sun is setting. (379-380).

Why does Nastasya Filippovna tell in her letter to Aglaya about this image of Christ that she had dreamed of? How does she see him? She is touched by the love of Christ for children and children for Christ, and, undoubtedly, she thinks about the prince, who has a special inner connection with children. But, perhaps, she sees in the child sitting at the feet of Christ, the image of the prince, who, as it is constantly emphasized, remained a child himself, both in a positive and negative sense, in the sense of the failed formation of an adult, the formation of a true man. . For with all the closeness of the prince to Christ, differences remain between them, entailing fatal, catastrophic consequences for Nastasya Filippovna. The healing, saving love of Jesus saved Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2; John 19:25; 20:1-18), while the love of the prince, which oscillates between deep compassion and impotent erotica, destroys Nastasya Philippovna (at least her earthly Existence).

Into what distance does Christ peer in the vision of Nastasya Filippovna, and what is His thought, "great as the whole world"? Dostoevsky, probably, means what he called at the end of his life, in Pushkin's speech on June 8, 1880, the universal destiny of Christ: "... the final word of the great, common harmony, the fraternal final consent of all

tribes according to Christ's evangelical law!" 4. And the look of Christ is sad, because he knows that in order to fulfill this task he needs to go through suffering and death.

In addition to Nastasya Filippovna, two more characters in the novel are closely connected in their lives and thinking with the image of Christ: Rogozhin and Ippolit.

Rogozhin comes out as something like a rival of the prince. He loves Nastasya Filippovna not with a compassionate love to the point of self-sacrifice, like a prince, but with a sensual love, where, as he himself says, there is no place for any compassion at all, but only carnal lust and a thirst for possession; and therefore, having finally taken possession of her, he kills her so that another does not get it. Out of jealousy, he is ready to kill his brother Myshkin - if only not to lose his beloved.

A completely different figure is Hippolytus. His role in the novel action, full of high drama, is small, but in terms of the ideological content of the novel it is very significant. "Hippolite was a very young man, about seventeen, maybe eighteen, with an intelligent, but constantly irritated expression on his face, on which the disease left terrible traces" (215). He "had consumption in a very strong degree, it seemed that he had no more than two or three weeks to live" (215). Ippolit represents the radical enlightenment that dominated the spiritual life of Russia in the 60s of the last century. Due to a fatal illness, which at the end of the novel destroys him, he falls into such life situation when worldview problems become extremely acute for him.

A picture that kills faith

Both for Rogozhin and Ippolit, the attitude towards Christ is largely determined by Hans Holbein the Younger's painting "Dead Christ". Dostoevsky saw this picture shortly before the start of work on The Idiot, in August 1867 in Basel. Dostoevsky's wife, Anna Grigorievna, describes in her memoirs the amazing impression that this picture made on Dostoevsky. He could not tear himself away from her for a long time, he stood by the picture, as if chained. Anna Grigorievna at that moment was very afraid that her husband would not have an epileptic seizure. But, having come to his senses, before leaving the museum, Dostoevsky returned again

4 Dostoevsky F. M. Full. coll. cit.: In 30 vols. T. 26. L., 1973. S. 148.

5 Dostoevskaya A. G. Memoirs. M., 1981. S. 174-175.

to a Holbein painting. In the novel, Prince Myshkin, when he sees a copy of this painting in Rogozhin's house, says that it can also cause someone else to lose faith, to which Rogozhin answers him: "That will also disappear." (182).

From further action it becomes clear that Rogozhin really lost his faith, apparently under the direct influence of this picture. The same thing happens with Hippolyte. He visits Rogozhin, who also shows him a picture of Holbein. Hippolyte stands in front of her for almost five minutes. The picture produces in him "a kind of strange anxiety."

In a lengthy "Explanation" which Hippolyte writes shortly before his death (mainly to "explain" why he feels he has the right to end his suffering by suicide), he describes the startling effect of this picture and reflects on its meaning:

This picture depicts Christ just taken down from the cross.<...>.this is in full view the corpse of a man who endured endless torment even before the cross, wounds, tortures, beatings from the guards, beatings from the people, when he carried the cross and fell under the cross, and, finally, the torment on the cross for six hours. True, this is the face of a man who has just been taken down from the cross, that is, he has retained a lot of living, warm in himself; nothing has yet had time to ossify, so that on the face of the deceased even suffering can be seen, as if he is still feeling it. but on the other hand, the face is not spared at all; there is only one nature, and truly such should be the corpse of a person, whoever he may be, after such torments. (338-339).

It is here that the most extensive theological discourse of the novel is presented. It is characteristic that Dostoevsky puts it into the mouth of an unbelieving intellectual, just as in his later atheists Kirillov in Possessed and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, more passionately than anyone else, indulge in meditation on theological topics. Like these two heroes of later novels, so the unfortunate Hippolytus from The Idiot recognizes in Jesus Christ the highest flowering of

humanity. Ippolit believes even in the New Testament stories about miracles, he believes that Jesus "won over nature during his lifetime", he especially singles out the resurrection from the dead, cites the words (as Ivan later in the "Grand Inquisitor") "Talitha kumi" uttered by Jesus over the dead daughter Jairus, and the words quoted in Crime and Punishment: "Lazarus, come out." Hippolytus is convinced that Christ was "a great and priceless being - such a being that alone was worth

of all nature and all its laws, all the earth, which was created, perhaps only for the mere appearance of this creature!

The goal of the cosmogonic and historical development of the world and humanity is the realization of the highest religious and ethical values ​​that we contemplate and experience in the image of Christ. But the fact that this manifestation of the Divine on earth was then mercilessly trampled on by nature is a sign and a symbol of the fact that the realization of values ​​is precisely not the goal of creation, that creation is devoid of moral meaning, which means that it is not at all "creation". "But damned chaos. The crucifixion of Christ is not for Hippolytus an expression of the love of the Lord, but only confirms the absurdity of the world. If the so-called creation is only such a "damned chaos", then doing good, which a person encounters as a categorical imperative, which seems to a person to fulfill the meaning of his life, is completely meaningless, and the threads connecting a person with the earth are cut off, and no reasonable argument (except perhaps an instinctive, irrational will to live) cannot prevent Hippolytus from ending his suffering by suicide.

But is Hippolytus really a completely unbelieving person, or does his consistent atheism put him on the threshold of faith? After all, the question remains open before Holbein’s picture: did Holbein want to say with his picture exactly what Hippolyte saw in it, and if he wanted to say this, then is he right: is what “nature” did with Christ the last word about him, or is there still something called "resurrection"? Just to the resurrection, or at least to the belief in the resurrection of the disciples of Jesus, Hippolytus hints in his "Explanation": ". how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this martyr will rise again?" (339). But we do know, and Hippolytus knows, of course, also, that after Pascha the apostles believed in the resurrection. Hippolytus knows about the faith of the Christian world: what "nature" did to Christ was not the last word about him.

Dog as a symbol of Christ

One strange dream of Hippolytus, which he himself cannot really understand, shows that in his subconscious lives, if not confidence, not faith, then, in any case, a need,

a desire, a hope that a power greater than the terrible power of "nature" is possible.

Nature appears to him in a dream in the form of a terrible animal, some kind of monster:

It was like a scorpion, but not a scorpion, but uglier and much more terrible, and, it seems,

precisely because there are no such animals in nature, and that it appeared to me on purpose, and that

in this very thing lies, as it were, some kind of secret (323).

The beast rushes through Hippolyte's bedroom, trying to prick him with its poisonous sting. Hippolyta's mother enters, she wants to grab the reptile, but in vain. She calls

dog. Norma - "a huge turnef, black and shaggy" - bursts into the room, but stands in front of the reptile as if rooted to the spot. Hippolyte writes:

Animals cannot feel mystical fright. but at that moment it seemed to me that in Norma's fright there was something, as it were, very unusual, as if also almost mystical, and that she, therefore, also had a presentiment, like me, that there was something fatal in the beast and what -something secret (324).

The animals stand opposite each other, ready for a deadly fight. Norma trembles all over, then throws herself at the monster; his scaly body crunches against her teeth.

Suddenly, Norma squealed plaintively: the reptile managed to sting her tongue, with a screech and howl she opened her mouth in pain, and I saw that the gnawed reptile was still moving across her mouth, releasing a lot of white juice from its half-crushed body onto her tongue. (324).

And at this moment Hippolyte awakens. It remains unclear to him whether the dog died from the bites or not. Having read the story of this dream in his "Explanation", he was almost ashamed, believing that it was superfluous - "a stupid episode." But it is quite clear that Dostoevsky himself did not at all consider this dream to be a "stupid episode." Like all dreams in Dostoevsky's novels, it is full of deep meaning. Hippolytus, who in reality sees Christ defeated by death, feels in his subconscious, manifested in a dream, that Christ conquered death. Because the disgusting reptile that threatened him in a dream is probably the dark power of death; Turnef, Norma, who, despite the “mystical fright” inspired by the terrible animal, enters into a life-and-death struggle, kills the reptile, but from him, before he dies, receives a mortal wound, can be understood as a symbol of that who in a deadly duel "trampled death by death",

as stated in the Easter hymn of the Orthodox Church. In the dream of Hippolytus, there is a hint of the words with which God addresses the snake: "it (i.e., the seed of the wife. - L. M.) will strike your head, and you will sting it on the heel" (Gen. 3) . Luther's verses are sustained in the same spirit (based on the Latin sequence of the 11th century):

It was a strange war

when life fought with death;

life there death is defeated,

life swallowed death there.

Scripture proclaimed that

how one death swallowed another.

Did Norma die from the last reptile bite? Did Christ come out victorious in the duel with death? Hippolyte's dream is interrupted before the answer to these questions could follow, for Hippolytus, even in his subconscious, does not know this. He only knows that Christ was such a being "who alone was worth all nature and all its laws" and that he "conquered nature during his lifetime." (339). That He conquered nature and its laws also in death - Hippolytus can only hope for this or, at best, guess about it.

Dostoevsky, it seems, ascribes to him another foreboding, introducing into the "Explanation" the words that when the disciples on the day of Jesus' death dispersed "in terrible fear", they still carried away "each one in himself an enormous thought that could never be plucked out of them." Ippolit and Dostoevsky do not say what kind of thought this is. Were these thoughts about the secret meaning of this death, say, the conviction that Jesus had to suffer death not as a punishment for his own guilt, which would correspond to the theological doctrine in force at that time in Judaism? But if not for your own, then for someone else's fault? Or is this a premonition, also indicated in the vision of Nastasya Filippovna: what

Christ, in order to fulfill his earthly mission, had to go through suffering and death.

What matters to the interpretation of Holbein's dead Christ in The Idiot is the fact that Holbein is a Western painter. The 16th century - the era of the Renaissance, humanism, the Reformation - was for Dostoevsky the beginning of the New Age, the birth of the Enlightenment. In the West, already by the time of Holbein, according to Dostoevsky, the conviction

that Christ is dead. And just as a copy of Holbein's painting ended up in Rogozhin's house, so a copy of Western atheism came to Russia along with European Enlightenment XVIII and XIX centuries. But even before the onset of the 16th century, the face of Christ was distorted and obscured by medieval Catholicism, when he set out to satisfy the spiritual hunger of mankind in a different way than Christ wanted - not by calling into the realm of freedom born of love, but by violence and the erection of bonfires, taking possession of the sword of Caesar, over the world.

In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin expresses thoughts that ten years later Dostoevsky will develop in detail in The Brothers Karamazov in the confession of the Grand Inquisitor. And just as in Pushkin's speech delivered a few months before his death, here too he contrasts the "Russian God and Russian Christ" with the rationalist West.

What did Dostoevsky want to say with these hurtful words? Are "Russian God and Russian Christ" new national deities that belong exclusively to the Russian people and form the basis of their national identity? No, just the opposite! This is the universal God and the only Christ, embracing with his love all mankind, in whom and through whom will be "the renewal of all mankind and its resurrection" (453). This Christ can be called "Russian" only in the sense that his face is preserved by the Russian people (according to Dostoevsky) in its original purity. Prince Myshkin expresses this opinion, often repeated by Dostoevsky in his own name, in a conversation with Rogozhin. He tells how once a simple Russian woman, in joy at the first smile of her child, turned to him with these words:

“But, he says, just as there is a mother’s joy when she notices the first smile from her baby, God has the same joy every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is before him with all his heart to pray becomes." This is what the woman said to me, almost in the same words, and such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, such a thought in which the whole essence of Christianity was expressed at once, that is, the whole concept of God as our own father and of the joy of God in man, like a father to his own child - the main thought of Christ! A simple woman! True, mother. (183-184).

Myshkin adds that the true religious feeling that gives rise to such a state of mind is "most clear and

Russian heart. you will notice "(184). But that at the same time a lot of dark things lurk in the Russian heart and a lot of sickness in the body of the Russian people, Dostoevsky knew too well. With pain and convincingly, he revealed this in his works, but in the most impressive way in the follow-up to "The Idiot" novel "Demons".