Gilmanov V.Kh., Gilmanova A.V. THE CONCEPT OF RIGHTNESS IN DOSTOYEVSKY’S NOVEL THE IDIOT
http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2014.3.3
Gilmanov Vladimir Khamitovich
Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Department of Historical Linguistics, Foreign Philology and Document Studies, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University
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Gilmanova Anastasiya Vladimirovna
Candidate of Philological Sciences, Librarian, Kaliningrad Regional Scientific Library
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Abstract. The article addresses the problem of assessment in The Idiot, the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The special attention is paid to the specifics of realizing the concept of rightness in the text of the novel. The ideological and communicative disunity and existential loneliness peculiar for most of Dostoevsky's novels, reach the special tragic culmination in The Idiot. It is Dostoyevsky's most "polyphonic" novel, but this polyphony is negative as it excludes the possibility of a dialogue and turns out to be the evidence of a communicative deafness for the most of the characters, tragic both for them and for the people around them. The Christian postulate about the impropriety to judge another in the situation of one's own unconscious sinfulness – "...Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" (Matthew 7: 1-5) is one of the novel's main ideas. In Dostoyevsky's novel the blindness towards one's own sinfulness goes with the blindness towards another. The Idiot is a novel about misunderstanding, and about the impossibility of an adequate perception of another. In this context the concept of rightness is actualized differently for each of the characters. The analysis of the lexemes through which this concept is actualized allows us to draw a conclusion on the destruction of the common assessment criterion reflected in the novel. In Dostoyevsky's novel each person is separated from another by the wall of their "hermeneutic circle" with its own understanding of rightness that can be compared to the "Meyer's wall" from the Hippolyte Terentyev's confession. The Hippolyte's "wall" being a cognitive metaphor becomes the mental isogloss in the cultural discourse of the existential world, and it is also the "discourse code" for the drama of the communicative disintegration of the human world. The tragic disunity of "hermeneutic circles" of the characters causes not only the anthropologic catastrophe, but the real existential collapse leading to dementia and even death.
Key words: concept of rightness, linguistic consciousness, lexeme, assessment criterion, mental isogloss.
THE CONCEPT OF RIGHTNESS IN DOSTOYEVSKY’S NOVEL THE IDIOT by Gilmanov V.Kh., Gilmanova A.V. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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