Abstract
I interpret Dostoevskij’s religious concepts in terms of mythogenesis and mythopoesis. Dostoevskij’s religious concepts arose on the basis both of his personal emotional experience and of the discourse of popular Orthodoxy. They demonstrate the antinomial nature of Russian spirituality, and are typified by his conception of the family, which illustrates the communal basis of the individual personality. The antimomial idea of the family is most fully developed in Dostoevskij’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the four models of fatherhood correspond to Isaac the Syrian’s concepts of physical, spiritual, mental and divine fatherhood.
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Notes
Without directly addressing Dostoevskij’s renowned use of “doubles” for his characters, it is worth calling attention to this technique. As Jurij Lotman once wrote, “The appearance of doubled characters is the result of the fragmentation of the mythological image, because of which the various names of the One become different individuals; it created a peculiar narrative language by means of which it became possible to relate human events and make sense of human actions” (2002: 732).
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Klimova, S. Conceptualizing religious discourse in the work of Fëdor Dostoevskij. Stud East Eur Thought 59, 55–64 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9017-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9017-8