DEAD ENDS IN DOSTOEVSKY

Program year: 1975/1976Digitized from print original stored in HDRThe purpose of this paper is to examine those cul-de-sac images in Dostoevsky's major novels in which the villains--principally Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Stavrogin in The Possessed, and Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov--destroy themselves, dramatically illustrating what Dostoevsky saw as the meaning of human existence without God. Critics looking upon Dostoevsky as a philosopher, a religious prophet, a psychologist, or a social thinker, usually overlook the most obvious fact about Dostoevsky--the fact that he wrote novels. Therefore, as Ernest J. Simmons, Rene Wellek, and Edward Wasiolek maintain, Dostoevsky should be considered primarily as "a novelist, a supreme creator of a world of imagination, an artist with a deep insight into human conduct and the perennial condition of man.”¹ My intention is to focus on this world of imagination, this labyrinthine universe of Dostoevsky's, and to show that this particular dead-end imagery--such as walls, sordid little rooms, corners filled with spiders--is a rich concretization of Dostoevskian themes, mirroring the nature of certain characters and intensifying the dramatic situations. In addition I intend to examine dead-endness as it applies on a higher level to the novels themselves. An evolving moral and spiritual vision characterizes Dostoevsky's novels. As he is a novelist of ideas, he can be seen implementing those ideas in characters and dramatic plots, working with them, shaping and and expanding and exploring their consequences. Each novel, taken as a whole, is a larger statement; as a world of moral imagination each is either open-ended or closed. This means that Dostoevsky explores the solutions and/or the lack of solutions to the moral dilemmas of his heroes and villains. The particular dead-end images, then, are parts of a wider picture as the corner of a room is part of a mansion