The Dispute between Fathers and Children in F.M. Dostoevskyʼs Novel The Possessed in Historical, Literary and Textual Aspects

The article offers a study of the dialogue between the older and younger generations of Russian people of the late 1860s, which informs the plot of F.M. Dostoevskyʼs novel “The Possessed” in connection with factual records of disputes between an “idealist” of the 1840s – Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (pseudonym “Granovsky” in the manuscripts of the novel) – and his son Pyotr Stepanovich, the organizer of an underground revolutionary circle in the city of N. The article examines a number of records related to the history of the relationship between these two characters in the preparatory materials for the work. The interpretive versions of these texts proposed in the Complete Works of Dostoevsky in 30 volumes (vol. 11, L., 1974) and an earlier edition of Dostoevskyʼs notebooks prepared by E.N. Konshina (1935) are critically evaluated. Our scrupulous study of these handwritten texts results in a new textual interpretation correcting previous erroneous readings. The article focuses on the specifics of Dostoevsky’s word usage, particularly on those lexemes from his artistic heritage which are associated with the studied fragments of the manuscript; the semantics and contextual connections of words and expressions invested with meanings within the texts in question (e.g. ‘fool’, ‘here’, and ‘noise’) are analyzed.

Keywords

F.M. Dostoevskyʼs novel “The Possessed”, “Fathers and Children” by I.S. Turgenev, T.N. Granovsky, S.G. Nechaev, “Nihilists”, textual studies, new readings of the manuscript

Acknowledgment

The work was carried out with the support of the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 18-18-00263 “Integrated automated database ‘United Digital Archive of F.M. Dostoevskyʼs manuscripts’ ”.

Received

29.12.2021

Publication date

29.12.2021

Number of characters

34294

Cite

GOST
MLA	Barsht, Кonstantin "The Dispute between “Fathers” and “Children” in F.M. Dostoevskyʼs Novel “The Possessed” in Historical, Literary and Textual Aspects." Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 80.6 (2021):20-29. DOI: 10.31857/S241377150017809-2
APA	Barsht К. (2021). The Dispute between “Fathers” and “Children” in F.M. Dostoevskyʼs Novel “The Possessed” in Historical, Literary and Textual Aspects. Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 80(6), pp.20-29 DOI: 10.31857/S241377150017809-2

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