Date of Award

Spring 1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Philip Raisor

Committee Member

Jean Halladay

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64 C436

Abstract

The pervading theme of Dostoevsky's novels is humanity's need to discover meaning in the natural world and in human experience. For generations, the Russian peasantry created myths and folk tales in order to understand the workings of Damp Mother Earth and to endow the earth and their lives with meaning. By the nineteenth century, however, the principles of Western materialism, which Dostoevsky likened to "intelligent bacteria," began to drift across the border and infect the Russian intelligentsia. These new Westernizers devoted themselves to dismantling existing religious and folk traditions and replacing them with a modern sign system based on science and reason. Yet, despite their efforts, an alternative way of interpreting the world survived.

In his novels, Dostoevsky taps into the power of this ancient sign system, drawing on elements of Russian myth as a means of subverting the encroaching discourse of science and rationalism. A "realist but in a higher sense," Dostoevsky appropriates popular characters from Russian folklore and sets them in the context of the real social, cultural and political debates that shaped the life of nineteenth-century Russia. Dostoevsky strives to prove that these myths still hold meaning for the modern world and that the mythic characters still have lessons to teach the educated modern Russian. In Crime and Punishment, the Baba Yaga appears in the form of an old pawn broker to guide a Westernized Brave Youth to redemption. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin returns to Russia as Yarilo, a Russian fertility spirit who expresses the meaning of creation and destruction. In The Devils, Marya Lebyadkin is the Swan Maiden who tests the faith of her Prince Ivan, Stavrogin. And in The Brothers Karamazov, a canine protagonist of a Russian Animal Tale teaches the next generation that ail life is connected. Dostoevsky believed that the greatest Russian literature drew its strength from the ideals of the people, and it is these ideals that Dostoevsky preserves in his novels.

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DOI

10.25777/0snx-4j11

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