Raskolnikov's Personality as a Symbol: A.F. Losev and F.M. Dostoevsky

• Published in: Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological journal
• Main Author: Elena A. Takho-Godi
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Russian
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences. A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature 2022
• Subjects: dostoevsky; crime and punishment; losev; mythology; symbol; christianity; philosophy; literature; autoprojection; Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages; PG1-9665; Penal; White Sea
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2022-3-133-146; https://doaj.org/article/89ed67db79f04c6ca4d1ad0aa77433af

The article is devoted to the analysis of the philosopher Alexei F. Losev’s (1893–1988) perception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works, especially of his novel Crime and Punishment. The author notes the thinker’s permanent interest in Dostoevsky’s legacy, starting from the 1900s and to the last days of his life. Special attention is paid to the reflections on Dostoevsky in Losev’s books The Dialectics of Myth (1930) and The Problem of Symbol and Realistic Art (1976), as well as in the report On Mythology in Literature (1983). Equally important are his epistolary legacy of 1932-1933 when Losev was imprisoned in a correctional labor camp on the construction of the White Sea Canal, and his fiction of the 1930s–1940s (the short story Life, the novel The Woman-Thinker). The central problem is the identification of Losev’s implicit understanding of Rodion Raskolnikov’s personality as a symbol – and the connection of this interpretation with Losev’s historiosophic concept of the formation of a “holistic universal human mythology”. Alongside this central problem other questions, no less significant, are addressed in the article: Losev’s understanding of Dostoevsky’s mythological realism as a whole and his attention to the early models determining the style of Dostoevsky’s ideological novels; both authors’ comprehension of the metaphysics of crime and their attitude to the Christian understanding of the concepts of “sacrifice” and “suffering”. Another important issue is Losev’s autoprojection on the novel Crime and Punishment, revealed in correspondence with his wife during his imprisonment in the labor camp. This auto-projection was due to the fact that the philosopher suffered from the “crime & punishment” syndrome firsthand, biographically, so to speak, which actualized the penal colony experience of Dostoevsky and of his literary hero in Losev’s own subconscious.