Nikolay Karamenov. Literary parents of Pavel Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov. Excerpt from the film "The Brothers Karamazov"

Libmonster ID: RU-13011

In the prosecutor’s indictment speech (chapter “Historical Review” of the twelfth book of “The Brothers Karamazov”), the reader twice encounters the same expression - “the field is clear”: “He (Mitya. - G. G.)... strives for an observation post<...>and there he finds out that Smerdyakov is epileptic, that another servant is sick, - the field is clear, and the “signs” in his hands - what a temptation”; “and here he is in his father’s garden, - the field is clear, there are no witnesses, deep night, darkness and jealousy (emphasis added - G.G.)" (15, 134, 135).

In this context, the concept of “field” is only a place of fortunate circumstances for the criminal. It invades the prosecutor’s speech from the legal verbal arsenal: one of the meanings of the concept “field” in Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary is “a judicial duel and its place.” 1

But for the reader of The Brothers Karamazov, this concept has long been associated with this concept (since the third book of the novel, “The Voluptuaries”), a deep spiritual problem that internally motivates Mitya’s confessions to his younger brother in three chapters of “Confession of a Warm Heart...”: “... the devil He fights with God, and the battlefield is the hearts of people"; “From abominations, from a field polluted with flies, let us move on to my tragedy, also to a field polluted by flies” (14, 100, 101).

The root origins of the figurative motifs associated with the concept of “field” date back to the time of Dostoevsky’s most disturbing thoughts about the loss of cohesive principles within Russian society, to the mid-1870s. 2 The anatomy of tactics that allows dividing forces to achieve victories is revealed by the writer in the third chapter of the January issue of “A Writer’s Diary” for 1876 (section “Spiritism. Something about devils. Extreme cunning of devils, if only they are devils”).

1 Dal V.I. Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language: In 4 volumes. St. Petersburg; M., 1882. T. 3. P. 258.

2 See about this: Galagan G. Ya. The problem of the best people in the legacy of Dostoevsky (1873 - 1876) // Dostoevsky. Materials and research. St. Petersburg, 1996. T. 12. P. 99 - 107.

G. Ya. Galagan, 2001

The goal of the combined aspiration of these forces is defined by Dostoevsky as follows: “The idea of ​​their kingdom is discord,” leading people “to the point of absurdity, to eclipse and perversion of the mind and feelings” (22, 34). The path to achieving the goal is carefully thought out: to crush a person “with stones turned into bread” (22, 35), and by pacifying him, eliminating the possibility of human rebellion. And further, warning readers against the consequences of underestimating the destructive energy of the spirit of evil, Dostoevsky continues: “... they write that spirits are stupid (that is, devils, evil spirits<...>). Judging like that is an extreme mistake.<...>They are deep politicians and go to the goal in the most subtle and sensible way<...>what if the devils having prepared the field and having already created enough discord, suddenly they want to expand the action immensely and move on to the real thing, to the serious? These are a mocking and unexpected people, and what will happen from them (emphasis mine. - G. G.)" (22, 33, 34, 36).

The professionally conditioned judgment of the prosecutor “the field is clear” (i.e., prepared for fatal events) is introduced into his speech by Dostoevsky in order to highlight the radical dissimilarity between the living, restless soul of the accused and the dead soul of the accuser, blindly following the one who prepared the field for the events of the criminal nights.

And this field was prepared quite skillfully: not only terrible, but also strange events took place in Karamazov’s garden. Motives doors And climbing(through some barrier) - the most important among the metaphorical symbols of the Gospel - turned out to be functionally changed (the murderer enters the door, and the innocent man in his father’s blood climbs over the fence 3). Wed. in the Gospel of John: “I am the seven door: whoever enters through Me will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture” (10:9); “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs inside, is a thief and a robber” (10:1); “The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy” (10, 10).

Who prepared the field for terrible and strange events in Karamazov’s garden?

The servant (and in all likelihood, the son of Fyodor Pavlovich) Pavel Smerdyakov suffered from an epileptic disease, was unsociable and silent, arrogant in his relationships with others and seemed to despise everyone. Self-will manifested itself in him from childhood. As a child, he hung cats and buried them secretly “with ceremony” (14, 114), imitating a church farewell to the dead. And a little later -

3 See more about this: Galagan G. Ya. Garden of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov // Dostoevsky. Materials and research. St. Petersburg, 2000. T. 15. P. 327 - 333. See also there about the role of motives doors And fence during the preliminary inquiry and trial.

with a question that perplexed Gregory, he stopped acquaintance with Sacred History and issued a categorical verdict on “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and Smaragdov’s “General History.” But at the same time, long before the events that prompted the narrator to take up his pen, back in “the time it is” (Grigory’s testimony - 15, 97), Smerdyakov gained a reputation as an extremely honest person: he found and returned to Karamazov three rainbow credit cards that he had lost.

The motive of Smerdyakov’s honesty in the novel is end-to-end: the testimony of Mitya (14, 11), the narrator (14, 116), Fyodor Pavlovich himself (14, 122), Grigory (15, 97), the prosecutor, who called Smerdyakov “highly honest by nature” (15 , 137).

The functional meaning of this motive is revealed from Smerdyakov’s confessions to Ivan (chapter “The Third, and Last, Date...”): “...I Fyodor Pavlovich, since they trusted me alone in all of humanity, taught the package<...>move money into the corner behind the image<...>. And here everyone now believed that they were lying under a mattress. Stupid reasoning, sir" (15, 62).

The reputation of an honest man acquired by Smerdyakov was a weighty argument in the system of accusations against Mitya, which allowed a miscarriage of justice to occur (see: 15, 137).

In addition to honesty, in which the elder Karamazov believed once and for all, he valued another quality in his lackey (being a glutton) - his extraordinary culinary abilities. These virtues of a servant are united by Fyodor Pavlovich in the chapter “Over Cognac”: “... he won’t steal, that’s what<...>bakes nice kulebyaks" (14, 122). Let us note here that training to become a cook in Moscow was instigated by Smerdyakov himself, who unexpectedly showed extraordinary disdain for food (14, 115).

It is important for the narrator to emphasize one more feature of Smerdyakov (which made itself felt long before Ivan’s arrival in Skotoprigonyevsk) - his concentration on something incomprehensible to everyone, which amazed everyone and could not be explained. Since the narrator’s judgment about this feature of Smerdyakov is important for subsequent analysis, we present it almost in full: “... sometimes in the house, or even in the yard, or on the street, it happened that he stopped, thought and stood there for ten minutes at a time. Physiognomist , having looked at it, I would say that there is no thought or thought here, but just some kind of contemplation. The painter Kramskoy has one wonderful painting called “The Contemplator”: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, on the road, in tatters. in a caftan and bast shoes, a little man stands alone, in the deepest solitude, he stands and seems to be thinking, but he doesn’t think, but “contemplates” something.<...>and if they had asked him what he was standing and thinking about, he would probably not have remembered anything, but he would probably have harbored within himself the impression under which he was during his contemplation. These impressions are dear to him, and he probably

he accumulates them, unnoticed and without even realizing it - for what and why, of course, he also doesn’t know: maybe, suddenly, having accumulated impressions over many years, he will leave everything and go to Jerusalem, wander and save himself, or maybe he will suddenly burn down his native village , or maybe both will happen together. There are quite a few people who are contemplative. Smerdyakov was probably one of these contemplators, and he probably also accumulated his impressions greedily, almost without even knowing why" (14, 116 - 117).

By the time of his meeting with Ivan, a lot of “impressions” had accumulated in Pavel Smerdyakov’s soul over many years. And don’t they explain the riveting of his attention to the middle of the Karamazov brothers with his idea of ​​permissiveness and the psychological conflict in the mind of the latter upon an unexpected collision with the “immenseness” of the offended pride of this contemplator and his ever-increasing “disgusting and special” familiarity (14, 243)? Ivan's affection for the servant is replaced by growing hatred, and then by disgust for him.

The nature of the impressions accumulated by Smerdyakov is largely clarified from his speech at dinner with Fyodor Pavlovich. Externally addressed to Gregory (in connection with the latter’s message about the feat of Thomas Danilov 4), and internally to Ivan, this speech is not at all a polemical impromptu. It contains Smerdyakov’s unconditional desire to declare himself as an individual, thoughtfulness of blasphemous motivations, and reliance on terminology that seems to be very far from him. Here are a few extracts from this speech: “Grigory Vasilievich,<...>Judge for yourself that since I was captured by the tormentors of the Christian race and they demanded that I curse the name of God and refuse my holy baptism, then I am fully authorized to do so by my own reason, for there will be no sin here<...>Judge for yourself, Grigory Vasilyevich. For as soon as I tell the tormentors: “No, I am not a Christian<...>"How immediately, by the highest court of God, I immediately and specifically become anathema, cursed and excommunicated from the church of the saint<...>so much so that at that very moment, sir - not just as soon as I utter it, but as soon as I think of uttering it, so that not even a quarter of a second will pass, sir, before I am excommunicated<...>. And if I’m no longer a Christian, then that means I didn’t lie to my tormentors<...>. For I was already drawn away by God himself from my Christianity, due to the mere design<...>Judge for yourself, Grigory Vasilievich,<...>I hope that, having once doubted, I will be forgiven when I shed tears of repentance" (14, 117 - 120).

4 Foma Danilov - non-commissioned officer of the 2nd Turkestan battalion, captured by the Kipchaks and killed in Margelan on November 21, 1875. In the “Diary of a Writer” for 1877 (January issue, chapter one, section “Foma Danilov, the tortured Russian hero”) Dostoevsky wrote that Foma Danilov, who suffered for his faith and showed extraordinary moral strength, is “the emblem of Russia, all of Russia, all of our people's Russia, its true image" (25, 14).

Let us pay attention to Fyodor Pavlovich’s remark during Smerdyakov’s speech: “Oh, you casuist<...>stinking Jesuit, who taught you?" (14, 119). And here we note the narrator’s remark regarding Ivan: “Smerdyakova<...>he watched with extreme curiosity" (ibid.).

The calmness, confident look, familiar smile (14, 244) of Smerdyakov, with whom Ivan meets shortly after this dinner, seem to suppress the will of the latter: “I sat on the bench at the gate<...>footman Smerdyakov, and Ivan Fedorovich understood from the first glance at him that in his soul there sat footman Smerdyakov and that it was precisely this man that his soul could not bear<...>he wanted to pass<...>silently and without looking at Smerdyakov through the gate, but Smerdyakov stood up from the bench, and from this gesture alone Ivan Fedorovich instantly guessed that he wanted to have a special conversation with him. Ivan Fedorovich looked at him and stopped, and the fact that he stopped so suddenly and did not pass by, as he had wanted a minute ago, angered him to the point of trembling. With anger and disgust he looked at Smerdyakov’s scopic, wasted face with combed temples and a fluffed little tuft. His left slightly narrowed eye blinked and grinned, as if saying: “No matter what you go, you won’t pass, you see that both of us, smart people, have something to talk about.” Ivan Fedorovich began to shake: “Get out, scoundrel, what kind of company am I for you, fool!” - flew from his tongue, but to his greatest surprise, something completely different flew from his tongue:

Is Father asleep or awake? - he said quietly and humbly, unexpectedly to himself, and suddenly, also completely unexpectedly, he sat down on the bench. For a moment he felt almost scared, he remembered it later. Smerdyakov stood opposite him, with his hands behind his back, and looked with confidence, almost sternly" (14, 244).

Smerdyakov’s calmness and familiarity remained unchanged in his last three dates with Ivan. First date: agreeing to talk with Ivan, he “condescendingly, as if encouraging the embarrassed visitor” (15, 43), asks him about his arrival time. “He was silent for a long time,” “he was calmly curious” (15, 44) - this is how the narrator emphasizes Smerdyakov’s complete psychological independence in dialogue with his interlocutor. Date two: Ivan instantly notices Smerdyakov’s glance at him - “decidedly angry, unfriendly and even arrogant: “Why are you wandering around?”<...>For what<...>have you come again?" (15, 50). Added to Smerdyakov’s impudent gaze is the impudence of his tone: “... in his voice one could even hear something firm and persistent, malicious and insolently defiant” (15, 51). A little later, this tone is called by the narrator “smug and doctrinaire” (15, 53). Third date: not at all surprised by Ivan’s arrival, Smerdyakov greeted him with a “long, silent”, “frantically hateful”

with an envious glance" (15, 58) and stared at him not with contempt, but almost "with some kind of disgust" (15, 59).

Concluding his confession to the crime, Smerdyakov says: “Everything was thought out in advance” (15, 66).

On the table in Smerdyakov’s room (chapter “The Third and Last Date...”) Ivan saw a thick book in a yellow wrapper. Wanting to hide the stolen money from prying eyes, Smerdyakov covers it (neglecting his dirty handkerchief) with three stacks of rainbow hundred-ruble banknotes. From the beginning to the end of Smerdyakov’s confessions about the preparation and commission of the crime, the book continues to lie on the stolen money. Ivan mechanically reads its title, “The words of our Holy Father Isaac the Syrian” 5 (15, 61).

The reader cannot help but remember that this book has already been mentioned on the pages of the novel. Speaking about Gregory’s primary interest (after the burial of his son) in the divine, the narrator notes, referring to the testimony of Marfa Ignatievna: “... obtained from somewhere a list of words and sermons of “our God-bearing father Isaac the Syrian,” read it persistently and for many years” (14 , 89).

From this testimony it is obvious, firstly, that the book of the Monk Isaac the Syrian was for many years in the wing of Gregory, where Smerdyakov lived from the moment of his birth, and, secondly, that it was important for Dostoevsky to draw the reader’s attention to both the teachings of Isaac the Syrian, entitled the concept of “Word” (with subsequent designation of the topic), and the appendix to the text of the teachings - a “list of words”, a kind of thematic index (mostly annotated) of the main problematic and semantic realities of each of the 91st “Words” of the ascetic. This appendix accompanies the works of Isaac the Syrian, published by the Optina Pustyn in 1854, 6 in an expanded composition is repeated in the 1858 edition, 7 becoming the basis for the “Alphabetical Index...” of subsequent editions of “Ascetic Words” in Russia. Name

5 Book by one of the church fathers, Christian ascetic and writer of the 7th century. Isaac the Syrian's "Ascetic Words" was in Dostoevsky's library. L.P. Grossman indicates the year of publication of the book Dostoevsky owned - 1858 (Grossman L. Seminar on Dostoevsky: Materials, bibliography, commentary. M.; Pg., 1922. P. 45).

6 See: Our Holy Father Isaac the Syrian, Bishop of the former Nineveh Words of spiritual asceticism, translated from Greek by Elder Paisius Velichkovsky / Edition of the Kozelskaya Vvedenskaya Hermitage. M., 1854. (Appendix). pp. 1 - 68. In one of the lists of Dostoevsky’s library, compiled by A.G. Dostoevskaya and stored in the manuscript department of the Institute of Literature, it is indicated that this particular publication was in his library.

7 Like our Holy Father Abba Isaac the Syrian, an ascetic and hermit, former bishop of the Christ-loving city of Nineveh, ascetic words. M., 1858. S. 621 - 655.

appendices - "Alphabetical index of items found in the book of St. Isaac the Syrian."

Both the long-term presence of “Ascetic Words” in Gregory’s wing, and the fact that Smerdyakov removes this book, deposited with stolen money, from it only after finishing his confessions, are significant. And they involuntarily encourage one to think about its significance in Dostoevsky’s work on the image of Smerdyakov.

In the narrator’s above judgment about contemplation and contemplators, visually referring the reader to Kramskoy’s painting, the difference between contemplation and reflection is noted. About the “little man” in the winter forest from Kramskoy’s painting: “...standing alone<...> stands and seems to be lost in thought, but he doesn’t think, but “contemplates” something” (14, 116). About Smerdyakov: “A physiognomist, having looked at him, would say that there is no thought or thought here, and so what something like contemplation" (ibid.).

It is important for the narrator to emphasize at the same time that those impressions “under which<...>during his contemplation" (14, 117) a person is present, they do not disappear without a trace. They hide in the soul of the contemplator and are accumulated by him. Sometimes - with greed, although it is not known why. But the nature of these impressions most decisively influences the possible actions of the contemplator in the future .

Concept contemplation connected with the deep layer of spiritual heritage of Isaac the Syrian. Since the publication of “Words of Asceticism” in 1858, it has been included in the “Alphabetical Index...”. 8 The thematic annotation to this concept identifies the most important aspects of the ascetic’s repeated returns to the interpretation of the state of contemplation.

For Dostoevsky himself, the presence in the index of the concept contemplation there was nothing new to report. He knew about Isaac the Syrian’s attention to the problem of contemplation from the text of the ascetic’s teachings. And of course, Smerdyakov owes the title “contemplator”, received from the narrator, not to the “Alphabetical Index...”, but to the problematic layer of teachings, which deals with “ghostly contemplation” as a consequence of the “corruption” of a person by “demonic dreams”, 9 about the impact of “demonic dreams” on a person’s thoughts (cf.: “The enemy knows that the victory of man and his overcoming<...> is produced by his thought and is accomplished in a short moment, if only the thought can move from its place" 10).

The functional meaning of the “list of words” noted by the narrator at the first mention of “Words of Asceticism” is associated with Pavel Smerdyakov: this list made it possible to explain why the book he accidentally opened (kept by Gregory)

8 Ibid. P. 650.

9 Ibid. pp. 391, 392.

10 Ibid. P. 471.

could arouse curiosity about myself. And why did this curiosity develop into Smerdyakov’s purposeful interest in the book?

The “Alphabetical Index...” to the “Ascetic Words” already from the publication of Optina Pustyn in 1854 included the concept silence. 11 Inaccessible to Smerdyakov’s understanding in its essence, it can nevertheless explain his suddenly awakened curiosity about the teachings of the ascetic: after all taciturnity was a universally recognized feature of Smerdyakov’s character, inextricably linked, moreover, with the impressions he had accumulated. And in the texts of the teachings, he saw very frequent appeals by Isaac the Syrian to the spiritual experience of the highly revered ascetic St. Apostle Paul. Here is an example of Isaac the Syrian’s reliance on the spiritual experience of his predecessor: “Since some people, damaged in their minds by demonic dreams, wanted to corrupt the teaching of the blessed apostles, the Divine Apostle (Paul - G.G.) was forced to turn into nothing the boasts of the heretics who boasted in the shadow the doings of the demons who appeared to them<...>. That is why blessed Paul, with one word, closed the door in front of all contemplation, and brought its shutter into silence." 12

Smerdyakov's heart was not a battlefield between the devil and God. It was the dwelling place of the devil. The impressions accumulated by the silent “contemplator” rebel: the teachings of the ascetic are perceived by them as a single personal enemy. The rebellion of these impressions motivates the consequences of Smerdyakov’s acquaintance with the “Words of Ascetics”, in “Homily 14” of which we, in particular, read: “Those who live in the rank of angels, that is, have care for the soul, are not commanded to please God with anything -or everyday, i.e., taking care of handicrafts or taking from one and giving to another<...>. If anyone, contrary to this, mentions the Divine Apostle Paul, that he worked with his own hands and gave alms, then we will tell him that Paul alone could do everything; We don’t know that there was another Paul, capable of anything like him. For show me another such Paul, and I will believe you... (emphasis added - G. G.)". 13

This appeal to the reader is perceived by Smerdyakov’s painful consciousness as a challenge. The words about the permission of the Apostle Paul (who had the same name as our silent “contemplator”) to “do everything,” mechanically removed from the context of the judgment of Isaac the Syrian, are associated by Smerdyakov with his own personality. This is how it appears another Paul, but already in the rank of the devil, claiming to prove his ability to do everything.

It is precisely this circumstance that determines the riveted attention of Smerdyakov to the middle of the Karamazov brothers, and

11 Ibid. P. 640.

12 Ibid. pp. 391, 392.

13 Ibid. P. 85.

the vastness of his pride, and the “disgusting” familiarity in his interactions with Ivan.

The specificity of the perception of “Ascetic Words,” conditioned by demonic dreams, also explains the thoughtfulness of Pavel Smerdyakov’s blasphemous motivations in his speech at Fyodor Pavlovich’s dinner. Reliance in this speech on the concept thoughts(and its derivatives), the plot of “repentance with tears” directly refers us to the text of the teachings. Compare: “...as soon as I tell the tormentors “no, I’m not a Christian”<...>at that very moment - s - not only as soon as I say it, but as soon as I think about saying it, so that not even a quarter of a second will pass before I am excommunicated<...>. And if I am no longer a Christian, then that means I did not lie to the tormentors" (Smerdyakov's speech) - "... the victory of man, and his overcoming<...>is produced by his thought and is accomplished in a short moment, if only the thought would move from its place" ("Ascetic Words"); 14 "I hope that, having once doubted, I will be forgiven when I shed tears of repentance" (Smerdyakov's speech) - "Tears<...>, - a means to obtain forgiveness of sins..."; "There is no unforgivable sin except unrepentant sin" ("Ascetic Words"). 15

Smerdyakov’s very address to his opponent also refers us to this book - "Judge for yourself" repeated by him many times. In “Homily 4” (“On the soul, on passions and on purity of mind, in questions and answers”), dwelling on the four reasons for the “movement of thoughts” in a person, Isaac of Syria says to his interlocutor: “... judge for yourself whether it is possible, so that before a person leaves the world, and before death, any one of these four causes becomes inactive?” 16

Another thing is important, with the appeal - “judge for yourself” - we meet twice in the Holy Scriptures. And both times - in the First Epistle to the Corinthians of the Holy Apostle Paul: “I speak to you as if you were wise; judge for yourself what I say” (1 Cor. 10:5); “Judge for yourself, is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?” (1 Cor. 11, 13).

Note that the concepts thoughts, tears, reasoning, sin included in the “Alphabetical Index...” to “Ascetic Words” already from the 1854 edition. 17

After dinner, with a speech from the silent “contemplator,” the fateful night is rapidly approaching. Knowing that the ill Grigory is helpless to help his father, Ivan leaves early in the morning,

14 Ibid. P. 471.

15 Ibid. P. 649. Wed. P. 288; 12.

16 Ibid. P. 34.

17 See: Our Holy Father Isaac the Syrian... P. 41, 39, 52, 48.

opening with this departure (and anticipating it) the way for crime. Two hours later, Smerdyakov will take advantage of his epileptic disease and leave Mitya in the dark about what is happening in the house. And at night, not only terrible, but also strange events will happen in Karamazov’s garden.

Let us return to the specifics of the perception of the teachings of Isaac the Syrian by a person corrupted by demonic dreams. With Smerdyakov's devilish desire to show that he is others Pavel, “capable of anything,” is responsible for the strangeness of the events of the fateful night (a functional change in motives doors And climbing(through some barrier) - the most important metaphorical symbols of the Gospel).

The New Testament motif of the door in “Words of Ascetics” is one of the main ones. Here, for example, is an extract from “Word 55”: “Heart<...>the village of God, and the door of grace is closed for it<...>according to what He said: " I am the door life, and by Me man will enter into life and pasture will appear"(John 10:9) to nourish his spiritual life, where neither evil nor delusion hinder him<...>. And in order to know the truth of this, namely, that spiritual life really is Divine contemplation of the mind, listen to the great Paul. For he cries: I do not want this without love; and if I do not enter contemplation through the lawful gates of love, then I will not desire it; and if it had been given to me by grace, when I had not acquired love, I do not covet it, because I did not enter through the natural door, which is love...” 18

The opportunity to prove that he is “capable of anything” is associated by Pavel Smerdyakov with the attempt on this core of the messages of the Apostle Paul and the teachings of Isaac the Syrian. The impressions that Smerdyakov had accumulated for many years, already united and rebellious, are finally ripe for active manifestation.

Preparing the field for future actions (it is still far from clear what) Smerdyakov began a long time ago. Even at a time when the reputation of an absolutely honest person and a skilled cook was acquired, which allowed Smerdyakov to become a confidant of the elder Karamazov, whom he hated. Smerdyakov’s main task at the final stage of “field preparation” was to connect door And fence in the plot of the upcoming crime.

He had long noticed Mitya’s habit of getting into the neighboring garden by climbing over the fence. His unexpected meeting with Alyosha in this garden speaks about this: “And how did you deign to get through this time, since the gates here have been locked for an hour?” he asked, looking intently at Alyosha. “And I walked from the alley through the fence straight into the gazebo. I hope you will forgive me for this" (14, 206). Marya Kondratievna, who was standing nearby, unexpectedly answers: “Oh, can we be offended by you?<...>So

18 See: Like our Father Abba Isaac the Syrian among the Saints... P. 384.

like Dmitry Fedorovich often goes to the gazebo in this manner(italics mine. - G. G.), we don’t even know, but he’s already sitting in the gazebo” (14, 202).

Climbing over the fence is thus the usual (and only) way for Mitya to find himself in a garden whose gates are locked.

Connect concept fence with concept door in the plot of the crime, Smerdyakov is unexpectedly helped by the “secret” of the elder Karamazov (who unconditionally trusted him) about “secret knocks” on the door or window, which should notify him of Grushenka’s arrival. How a harbinger of trouble invades the concept door into the consciousness of Mitya, who immediately learned from Smerdyakov about the door as one of the components of his father’s “secret”: “A deep melancholy came over<...>his soul<...>. He suddenly imagined a garden, passage after garden, a door mysteriously opening in his father’s house, and Grushenka running through the door” (14, 340).

The crime took place in Karamazov's garden. But what happened there did not completely coincide with the plan, the implementation of which Smerdyakov did not have the slightest doubt. He was convinced that the same person, Mitya, would climb over the fence and enter the door of the house: “... there was no longer any doubt for me that they would arrive that very night, for they, having lost me, would have no we have no information, they certainly had to climb into the house themselves through the fence, sir, as best they could, sir, and do whatever it takes... I expected them to kill Fyodor Pavlovich, sir <...>it's probably sir. That’s why I already prepared them this way... in the last days, sir..., and most importantly, those signs became known to them. With their suspiciousness and rage that has accumulated in them over these days, they would certainly have penetrated into the house through the signs, sir. This is certain. That's what I expected them to be(italics mine. - G.G.)" (15, 62).

If this had happened (the killer climbs over the fence and enters the door), the events of the tragic night in Karamazov’s garden would have been associated not with a functional change in the two main metaphorical symbols of the Gospel, but - elimination problematic and semantic opposition of these functions.

The silent “contemplator,” obsessed with demonic dreams, could not foresee one thing: Mitya did not enter the door of the house (it doesn’t even matter whether he kills or beats his father). The main thing is that he didn’t enter. He was stopped by a force that overcame the devil: “...whether it was whose tears, whether my mother begged God, or whether the bright spirit kissed me at that moment - I don’t know, but the devil was defeated. I rushed from the window and ran to the fence” (14, 426).

The murder of Karamazov by Smerdyakov is the end of the events of the tragic night that was not foreseen by the latter. The discrepancy between what was planned and what happened is used by Smerdyakov: having killed Karamazov, he gets the opportunity to call Ivan (who psychologically gave all the grounds for this) - “the main murderer”, and himself - his student; he leaves it on the floor in the room

the murdered bag of stolen money, thereby planting one of the “indisputable” evidence of Mitya’s guilt (and suggesting to the prosecutor during the preliminary investigation the reason for its indisputability (15, 66)), finally leaves “wide open” (14, 410) the door from the house to garden, anticipating (not at all what he expected) Grigory’s erroneous testimony about the “open door,” which became the most “capital” (15, 96) evidence in Mitya’s accusation.

Dostoevsky makes the long silent “contemplator” the author of the comparison “the main - not the main” murderer (Ivan - Smerdyakov); who repeated this comparison, but in a different semantic parallel (Mitya - Smerdyakov), - the prosecutor, who rejected any possibility of assumptions about the servant’s complicity in the crime (15, 146). Thus, a motive is introduced into the prosecutor’s argumentation system, which is directly related to Smerdyakov’s realized intention to doom Ivan to mental death.

The silent “contemplator” managed to kill the elder Karamazov, steal money, and destroy Ivan and Mitya. But the devilish thirst of this main killer, the thirst to prove that he is another Pavel, capable of anything, was not yet completely satisfied.

The book of teachings of Isaac the Syrian lay on the table between Ivan and Smerdyakov, who were sitting on opposite sides. "He (Ivan. - G.G.) he came in from the other end of the table, pulled a chair up to the table and sat down" (15, 58). Ivan still does not know that he is seeing Smerdyakov for the last time. But for Smerdyakov, suicide is a settled issue.

After Smerdyakov’s confession about Mitya’s non-involvement in the murder, a confession that stunned Ivan and struck the killer with the sincerity of the fear of those sitting opposite, the following dialogue follows:

You know what: I’m afraid that you’re a dream, that you’re sitting in front of me as a ghost? - he stammered (Ivan. - G.G.).

- There is no ghost here, sir, except both of us, sir, and some third one. Without hesitation, here he is now, the third one, is between the two of us.

- Who is he? Who is there? Who's third?<...>

The third one is God, sir, this very providence, sir, here it is now near us(italics mine. - G. G.), just don’t look for him, you won’t find him” (15, 60).

And after this, Smerdyakov pulls out the stolen money from under the stocking of his left leg, puts it on the table and covers it with a book of teachings of the ascetic.

Teachings of Isaac the Syrian for those who imagine themselves others Pavel Smerdyakov personified the main force with which he entered into the struggle. And this power showed that the ability to do anything another Pavel - not limitless: Mitya could not become his father’s killer; re-

the one who climbed over the fence and who entered the door of the house turned out to be different people. Smerdyakov’s words about the presence of God and providence in the room are most directly connected with the book “Ascetic Words,” which lay on the table between the two murderers.

Still in the same “Alphabetical Index...” to the teachings of Isaac the Syrian, published in 1854, there is the concept fishing 19 God's providence - otherwise providence. The annotation to this concept in the index refers us to a number of teachings of the ascetic. Including “Word 31”, in which we read: “Not a single slave can harm any of the slaves like him, without the permission of the Provider of all and the Manager of everything (...). If freedom is given to others, then not in every matter, for neither are demons, nor destructive beasts, nor vicious people. cannot fulfill their will for harm and destruction, unless the ruling one allows this(italics mine. - G. G.), and will not give him room to a certain extent." 20

Ivan leaving Smerdyakov’s room is a broken and mentally crushed man. Smerdyakov, who remains in it, has no doubts about the court’s complete distrust of Ivan’s possible confessions (“Well, who will believe you, well, what evidence do you have?” - 15, 67). Just as there is no doubt either about the mental death of this “former brave man” (15, 68), or about Mitya’s condemnation.

But in order to show his absolute ability to do anything, Smerdyakov, who does not believe in either God or God’s providence, remains to complete one more task: to prove that his will is not subject to the will of providence, not subject to the force that stopped Mitya at the door of his father’s house. Which is what Smerdyakov does, committing suicide. And in his suicide note, the syllable of which seemed “peculiar” to the prosecutor (15, 141), he speaks of the insubordination of his will to anyone else: “I destroy myself with my own will and desire, so as not to blame anyone” (15, 141).

Thus ended the battle between the devil and God on the fertile soil of discord. The cunning, well-thought-out tactics and strategy of the spirit of evil, against underestimating the capabilities of which Dostoevsky warned the reader back in the January issue of “A Writer’s Diary” for 1876, took on artistic flesh. And although Smerdyakov’s suicide is evidence of the self-destructive principle within the forces of separation, Dostoevsky’s warning will never cease to be alive.

19 See: Our Holy Father Isaac the Syrian... pp. 44 - 45.

20 See: Like our Father Abba Isaac the Syrian among the Saints... P. 204 - 205.

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Nikolay Karamenov

Literary parents of Pavel Smerdyakov

The fact that the images of some heroes of the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” were interpreted by their author as images of heroes of the works of other writers, in any case, that they had a literary forerunner, a certain artistic prototype that made both an aesthetic and ideological impression on F.M. I learned about Dostoevsky almost by accident when I was writing an article about Smerdyakov and at the same time I began reading R. Hildreth’s novel “The White Slave.”

For me, Smerdyakov was and remains the most mysterious character in The Brothers Karamazov, since he experienced the fate of a slave, almost in the literal sense of the word “the bath phlegm started”, was a serf, the property of his father Fyodor Pavlovich, and after the peasant reform he became his cook and lackey. That is, when the sons of Fyodor Pavlovich came to visit their father or stayed with him, as Ivan did, the unfortunate Smerdyakov became the lackey of his own brothers.

But Smerdyakov was an exceptional slave and lackey, and therefore it is difficult to find others like him in the works of Russian writers who in one way or another described serfs or tried to expose slavery in Russia through depictions of their lives. Usually in Russian works about Russian slaves, created by people who experienced serfdom and often encountered its various manifestations, in the description of the serfs there is a certain feeling of guilt or a sense of tenderness and even surprise, but not contempt or disgusted detachment, as can be felt in the example F. Dostoevsky's descriptions of Pavel Smerdyakov. I did not find anyone reminiscent of Smerdyakov either in D. Grigorovich, or in I. Turgenev, I. Goncharov and L. Tolstoy. Perhaps it was for this reason that I was generally interested in the topic of slavery, and I began to look for literature that would vividly describe the image of a slave. Naturally, I immediately remembered “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and then, after rummaging on the Internet, I found the book “The White Slave” by the American writer R. Hildred.

The novel "The White Slave" was first published in the USA in 1836, and translated into Russian and published in Russia in 1862. The novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in America in 1852, and translated into Russian and published in Russia in the magazine Sovremennik in 1858. These novels could hardly have passed the attention of F. Dostoevsky, or any other Russian educated person, because they revealed the topic of slavery, which was important for serf Russia, and were published in Russia even before its abolition. In addition, the number of translated works, especially those as serious and topical for pre-reform Russian society as the novels of R. Hildred and H. Beecher Stowe, was scanty in those days, and therefore, usually, enlightened people immediately bought them and read them avidly.

From the very first pages of the novel “The White Slave,” the coincidence between Smerdyakov and the hero of “The White Slave,” quadroon Archie, is striking. Firstly, as trivial as it may seem at first glance, Smerdyakov and Archie are white slaves of their fathers, that is, they were the property of their parents or, if you like, their talking things.

In the chapters of the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” “Smerdyakov” and “Contraverse” the reader is exposed to the undisguised cynical attitude of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his legitimate children towards their illegitimate son and brother Pavel Fedorovich Smerdyakov. At the dinner table, eating with appetite the dishes prepared and served by the cook and footman Smerdyakov, Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan, with the tacit consent of Alexei, insidiously push the helpful and vain Smerdyakov to philosophize and argue with another footman, Grigory, that is, while serving them, begin to talk about - Is it possible to renounce Christ and the Orthodox faith in moments of mortal danger? Smerdyakov is here called “the donkey of Valaam,” and, according to the narrator, on whose behalf the novel is narrated, “Smerdyakov was very often allowed to stand at the table before, that is, at the end of dinner. From the very moment Ivan Fedorovich arrived in our city, he began to show up for dinner almost every time.”, Smerdyakov “he turned to Grigory with visible pleasure, answering, in essence, only Fyodor Pavlovich’s questions and understanding this very well. But deliberately pretending that it was as if Grigory was asking him these questions.”.

Pavel Fedorovich Smerdyakov tried to please Ivan, so he tried to reason logically and effectively, citing examples to confirm his thoughts that would impress Ivan. In other words, Smerdyakov tried with all his might to show his father and his brothers (Ivan and Alexei) that he was a smart, intelligent person (in his understanding, naturally), which his very close relatives did not think about him. From an ethical point of view, Smerdyakov’s reasoning is disgusting, just as, probably, any attempt by a lackey or slave, without taking into account moral connotations, to please his master or owner, would be disgusting, but he presents these reasonings using everyday logic and common sense, his thoughts have a unique style and they also say that the former slave, lackey Smerdyakov, is a rather intelligent person and under certain circumstances, if he had been born a nobleman and not a serf, he would have achieved results in the field of mental activity no worse than his brother Ivan, who is studying at the university, and, maybe even better.

His reasoning almost brings his father into an ecstatic state. Having heard Smerdyakov’s next lengthy discussions about faith, his father and owner "squealed<>in the apotheosis of delight". Fyodor Pavlovich, trying to express his joy from the fun that the talking thing can also reason, speaks about Smerdyakov, turning in turn to Alexei, Ivan and also Smerdyakov: Alyoshka, Alyoshka, what is it like! Oh, you casuist! It was he who was with the Jesuits somewhere, Ivan. Oh, you stinking Jesuit, but who taught you? But only you lie, casuist, lie, lie and lie.<>Tell me this, donkey (hereinafter it is emphasized by me, the author of the article) » .

However, almost similar cases, that is, the entertainment of masters with the manifestation of education and mental activity of a slave, as something amusing, are described in the novel “The White Slave.” In “The White Slave,” Archie, a slave who grew up in his father’s house, tells the reader about the knowledge he gained while serving his brother James. Since James was a boy in poor health, and Archie had an excellent memory, it was decided, as Archie narrates, for the narration in the novel comes from his perspective, “that the teacher assigned to James will teach me the alphabet, and then first of all, reading, I will remember all this well, and then, during games, taking advantage of the opportunity, I will transfer this knowledge to my young master.” Archie also says that “Colonel Moore, wanting to dispel James, bought him books<>and reading gradually became our favorite pastime.”.

Colonel Moore is Archie's father and owner. As for Smerdyakov, he was taught to read and write by the servant Grigory, who took Smerdyakov into his care immediately after his newly born son died, and offered Smerdyakov books from his personal library - his father and owner Fyodor Pavlovich. Here, too, a peculiar analogy can be traced between the destinies of Smerdyakov and Archie. It’s just that Archie grew up with his weak brother, who died at a young age, and Smerdyakov grew up instead of his son Grigory, who died in infancy.

Archie, telling the reader about his education, says that when he was a child, “ then they had not yet seen, as they now see in every literate black man who shows at least some abilities, a terrible monster, ready at any moment sedition and dreaming only that cut throat to all honest American citizens. But on the other hand, I seemed to all these gentlemen to be some kind of phenomenon, something like four legged chicken or ram (Smerdyakov is a donkey for his masters), which nature has endowed with two pairs of eyes instead of one. I was "monster", suitable for the amusement of visiting guests".

Smerdyakov's mother Smerdyakov died during childbirth, and Smerdyakov was taken into care by Grigory instead of his deceased six-fingered son.

About the newly born child Smerdyashchaya, to whom Fyodor Pavlovich would later give the surname Smerdyakov, Grigory told his wife Varvara: “God’s orphan child is relatives to everyone, and even more so to you and me. Our deceased sent this one, and this one came from demon's son and from the righteous woman. Eat and don't cry in the future". In other words, for Grigory, yes, for sure, and for other characters who knew the story of Smerdyakov’s birth and adoption, Smerdyakov was "monster" sent "monster" and was brought up instead "monster". It should also not be forgotten that Smerdyakov was constantly humiliated, reminding him that he was not born, like all people and living beings in general, but was born from the mud of a bathhouse.

Continuing the story of his education, Archie says: “It often happened that I was called to the dining room after the copious libations at the richly decorated table had managed to lift the spirits of the guests. I was forced to read an article from a newspaper. Such an incredible phenomenon as a slave who could read fluently made the tipsy guests laugh to tears.

In such cases, they pestered me with all sorts of ridiculous and offensive remarks, tormented me and tormented me with mocking and offensive questions, which I was forced to answer - I knew that otherwise a glass, bottle or plate might fly into my face.

Master William was especially sophisticated. Deprived of the opportunity to beat me with a whip, at least as often as he would have liked, he rewarded himself by choosing me as a target for the most rude remarks and ridicule. He, by the way, was very proud of the nickname he invented for me “dark sage” , although, God knows, my face was as white as his.” .

Archie is a “monster” used by his master and his host’s guests for fun, Smerdyakov is a “Valaam donkey”, a “stinking Jesuit”, which in the context of his social position means almost the same as “dark sage”; Moreover, the similarity of the situations between these two characters in both cases is reinforced by the relatives very close to them sitting at the table: in both cases, their own father and brothers use their services as a slave and former slave and lackey. Archie's older brother William is very reminiscent of Dmitry, and both of these characters suffered due to their violent, aggressive behavior. William was killed in a duel, as a result of a quarrel he started at a cockfight, and Dmitry, who allegedly did not kill his father, was nevertheless determined by the jury to be guilty, since all the residents of the town had the opinion that such a brawler like him was the only could do it. In addition, Dmitry always threatened Smerdyakov that he would kill him if he did not report to him about his father and Grushenka. When Smerdyakov complains to Alexey about Dmitry, he says: “But even here they inhumanly embarrassed me with incessant demand about the master: what, they say, and how is it with them, who comes and who goes, and can’t I tell them anything else? They even threatened me with death twice.<>If, they say, I let Agrafena Alexandrovna through and she spends the night here, I won’t be the first to live.”.

And William, like Dmitry, who threatens Smerdyakov with violence, also frightened his slave brother by saying that he would treat him cruelly. After the death of his younger brother James, William asked his father to give him Archie as a servant. He believed that “any condescension shown to slaves can only cause them to become conceited and arrogant: these ungrateful animals still do not know how to appreciate kindness”. Hearing about William's desire and knowing his cruel nature well, Archie said: “These words horrified me. I knew that Master William was a real despot.".

What Archie and Smerdyakov have in common is their peculiar craving for knowledge, the desire to philosophize: acting as jesters and at the same time serving their masters during lunch or dinner, they catch every smart and unusual word thrown by their hosts or their hosts' guests. It was during such philosophizing of Ivan and the cynical encouragement of Smerdyakov on the part of Ivan and Fyodor Pavlovich to “reason” that Fyodor Pavlovich’s illegitimate son was imbued with the idea of ​​permissiveness. Dmitry's idea of ​​permissiveness struck him and sank deeply into his soul, since he himself is a product of permissiveness, the result of Fyodor Pavlovich's coitus with the holy fool Stinking, therefore, most likely, he, too, like Archie, more than once wondered about his destiny and his place in society. Archie constantly tormented himself with the question: "A slave to my own father, a servant to my own brother - who am I?". In fact, regarding his social status, Smerdyakov could completely repeat Archie’s words, with the only difference that he was a slave in the past, before the peasant reform, but remained a cook and footman of both his father and his brother Ivan, who was visiting his father .

Pavel Smerdyakov, having been “fascinated” for some time by Ivan’s thoughts about permissiveness, in his last conversation with Ivan, when he admitted that it was he who killed Fyodor Pavlovich, reproached his brother: “Everyone was brave then, sir, “everything, they say, is allowed,” they said, sir, but now they’re so scared.”.

As for Archie, while serving his masters and their guests, he simultaneously experienced both a feeling of resentment and humiliation, and a feeling of delight, especially when he witnessed various “smart” conversations of the masters. Archie tells the reader about this: “Their conversations delighted me. Hearing them talk about equal rights for all and rage against oppression and oppressors, I felt my heart expand with excitement.<>I was fascinated by the beauty of these concepts - freedom and equality.". But Pavel Smerdyakov also witnessed Ivan’s conversations not about freedom and equality, but about complete self-will- about permissiveness, and they, too, like the conversations about the equality of people of the slave Archie, seduced him, sowed delight and hope in his soul, because, in fact, that, from our point of view (in the soul of a slave, we hardly ever we can look) does a slave or lackey care if it is not complete freedom or, if he has suffered for a long time in captivity and was mocked for a long time, self-will, that is, permissiveness? Smerdyakov’s father speaks about the fascination of a lackey or a slave with conversations about freedom or self-will, albeit in a roundabout way, when he asks, regarding Smerdyakov, his own son Ivan: “Smerdyakov now comes here every day at lunch, is he so curious about you, what did you do to please him so much?”.

One of the plot lines of the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” seems to have been copied from the pages of “The White Slave” - we are talking about the passion of a father for the chosen one of his own son. As you know, Fyodor Pavlovich experienced a morbid passion for his daughter, Grushenka, who was his age. But his eldest son Dmitry also pined for Grushenka, and Grushenka herself gave more preference to her son, and, in the end, fell in love with Dmitry. Hatred based on jealousy corrodes the relationship between father and son, so it comes to the point that Dmitry is tried, considering him the murderer of Fyodor Pavlovich, and punished with ten years of hard labor. Although the external outline of events in the novel turns to the reader in such a way that it seems obvious that Fyodor Pavlovich was killed by his illegitimate son Smerdyakov, there is still no complete certainty about this, and a suspicion still remains - what if, after all, Dmitry committed the murder?

In “The White Slave,” the slave Archie’s own father and master has sexual desires for his wife’s new maid, the slave Cassie, whom Archie loves. Cassie loves Archie too. They secretly get married, try to escape from captivity, but they are caught, fate separates them for a long time, and they have to fully experience the cup of despair before becoming free people and finding each other again. The impetus for Cassie and Archie's escape was precisely the sexual harassment of Archie's father, Colonel Moore, towards Cassie. Archie reports his father's feelings for his lover and wife: “Cassie was too pretty not to awaken the desires of a voluptuous man, whose habit of gratifying his desires had suppressed all good feelings, making him unable to restrain his urges - the desire of a person who need not fear punishment for his vices, as well as condemnation from others. society". It is written as about the elder Karamazov, the voluptuous Fyodor Pavlovich. Also about his father, regarding his claims to Cassie, Archie says: "From the very day of his arrival, Colonel Moore began to show unexpected attention to her. Not content with the small gifts with which he generously rewarded her, the colonel constantly looked for an opportunity to talk to her and each time, half-jokingly, half-seriously praising her beauty. His remarks were sometimes unambiguous, but Cassie pretended not to understand anything.”.

The tragic triangle, son, father, son's beloved, for whom the father has passion, in The Brothers Karamazov seems to be copied from the tragic triangle that takes place in the novel The White Slave; it’s just that in The Brothers Karamazov one of the vertices of this triangle is not Smerdyakov , that is, not a slave and servant, who is also the son of his owner, but the eldest son of Fyodor Pavlovich.

The coincidence of some scenes, characters and plot collisions in The Brothers Karamazov with the scenes, characters and conflicts of The White Slave is not limited only to this work about slavery in the United States of America. “Uncle Tom's Cabin” was translated into Russian in 1858, and since, at that time, and in serf Russia, such a work was impossible not to notice and ignore, it was read by F. Dostoevsky and, one hopes, impressed him. For this reason, some scenes in The Brothers Karamazov and some characters in The Brothers Karamazov are creatively based on scenes and characters in Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

At the very beginning of the novel by the American writer, literally on the second page, there is a scene that, in its semantic meaning, is directly related to what is symbolically named in “The White Slave” and in “The Brothers Karamazov” with the “dark sage”, “Valaam donkey”, “damned Jesuit” "

We are not talking about any talent of the slave described in it, or a cynical attempt by the masters to challenge the lackey to a philosophical conversation and, thereby, amuse themselves and mock him. It is only about the abilities of a little slave, which his master also uses for his own amusement, as in “The Brothers Karamozov” the Karamazov father and his son Ivan do, or in “The White Slave” Colonel Moore and his guests at the dinner table. In The Brothers Karamazov, for example, Fyodor Pavlovich, having had his fill of the dishes that his lackey and son Smerdyakov had prepared for him, and also having thoroughly amused himself with Smerdyakov’s attempts to philosophize, leaned towards his son Ivan and asked him: “Smerdyakov comes here every time at dinner now, how did you please him so much?<>

- Absolutely nothing, - Ivan answered, decided to respect me; This is a lackey and a boor. Advanced meat, however, when the time comes".

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, in the scene where Tom's master, Mr. Shelby, sells his best and most honest slave to the slave trader Gailey, because he is mired in debt, Shelby and Gailey are sitting at the table over a bottle of wine, just as they sit at the dinner table his father and owner making fun of Archie, as well as his older brother William and his father’s guests, or how his father and brother Ivan, fed up with Smerdyakov’s dishes and mocking him. In order to somehow brighten up a not very pleasant conversation - after all, you have to sell an impeccably honest man, Mr. Shelby, just like Colonel Moore of his son Archie or Fyodor Pavlovich of his illegitimate son and lackey Smerdyakov, calls to him a handsome slave boy. This scene should be quoted in full, because there is reason to believe that this scene, like the scene of fun over Archie’s learning in “The White Slave,” made an impression on F. Dostoevsky and was creatively interpreted by him into the scene in “The Brothers Karamazov” in the chapter “ Controversy" and "Over Cognac". As soon as Mr. Shelby told the slave trader that he hated selling his blacks, “At that moment the door opened and a charming quadroon boy of four or five years old entered the dining room. There was something extraordinarily sweet in his whole appearance. Thin black hair framed her round, dimpled face in silky curls; large, full of fire, dark eyes looked around with curiosity from under fluffy long eyelashes.<>

- Hey you, black -haired! - said Mr. Shelby and, whistling, threw a sprig of raisins to the boy. - Catch!

The boy rushed as fast as he could for the handout to the loud laughter of his master.

“Come here, black -haired,” Mr. Shelby ordered.

The boy ran up to the call, and the owner stroked his curly head and tickled his chin.

- Come on, show the gentleman how you can sing and dance.

- Bravo! - Hailey shouted, throwing him a slice of orange.

“Now show me how Uncle Cudjoe walks when he has rheumatism,” said Mr. Shilby.

The boy’s flexible body instantly transformed: he hunched over, made a sad grimace and, grabbing his master’s cane, hobbled from corner to corner like an old man, spitting left and right every now and then.

Both gentlemen laughed loudly.

- And now, black -haired, imagine the grandfather of Elder Robins. Well, how does he sing psalms?

The baby's plump face stretched out, and with extraordinary seriousness he began to sing a prayer melody in a nasal voice.

- Bravo, bravo! Good job! - Hailey exclaimed. - This boy will go far! And you know what,” he suddenly patted Mr. Shelby on the shoulder, “throw him to me in addition to Tom - and that’ll be the end of it!”.

The unprepossessing, homely Smerdyakov, trying to amaze the masters with his philosophizing, as well as the disgusting, even outwardly, owner and father Fyodor Pavlovich are the scene with Shelby and the quarter boy interpreted into Russian reality.

Strange as it may seem at first glance, a certain similarity in the characters and spiritual qualities of Smerdyakov and Uncle Tom is also striking. Fyodor Pavlovich highly appreciates Smerdyakov not only for his ability to cook excellent dishes, but also for his honesty. Smerdyakov is a highly professional in his field, and his owner and father tells Alexei about him: “Notable coffee, Smerdyakov’s. I have Smerdyakov as an artist for coffee and kulebyaks, and he’s also a big fan, really.”. The novel describes a case when the money lost by Fyodor Pavlovich was found by Smerdyakov and returned to him, which greatly surprised his master - a lackey, but an honest one. Dmitry, telling Alexei about his father and the three thousand that his father hid to give to Grushenka, says: “and no one knows where his money is, except for the lackey Smerdyakov, in whose honesty he believes as in himself.”.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Uncle Tom's honesty and piety are spoken of by his owner, Mr. Shelby, as a first-class, most expensive commodity: “You can be sure that Tom has the real deal.<>Well, judge for yourself. Last fall I sent him to Cincinnati on some business. He was supposed to deliver five hundred dollars to me from there. I tell him: “Tom! I trust you as a Christian. I know that you will not deceive your master." And he returned home, which I didn’t doubt for a minute.”.

Having been sold to another owner, Uncle Tom still retained his honesty and piety: “Using the complete trust of the owner, who gave him money without looking and put the change in his pocket without counting, Tom could well have cheated, and only spiritual purity, supported by faith in God, kept him from such a temptation. He responded to the boundless trust placed in him, as if by an oath of the most scrupulous honesty.”. It is noteworthy that even the piety of Tom, who constantly carried the Bible in the pocket of his canvas pants and read it every free minute, was creatively interpreted by F. Dostoevsky, as a result of which Smerdyakov turned out to be, although not pious and far from religious, but, as it were, very often meditating, which may also have represented a kind of religiosity. Smerdyakov “Sometimes in the house, or even in the yard, or on the street, it happened that I would stop, think and stand like that for even ten minutes. A physiognomist, having looked at him, would say that there is no thought or thought here, but some kind of contemplation.<>There are quite a few people who are contemplative. Smerdyakov was probably one of these contemplators, and he probably also accumulated his impressions greedily, almost without even knowing why.”.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” influenced the creation of the image of Smerdyakov, however, in Beecher Stowe’s novel there is an image and a scene that were almost copied by F. Dostoevsky, and appear before the reader, albeit in a slightly different form (the heroine becomes a hero), but still However, the analogy between the image of Markel from The Brothers Karamazov and the image of the girl Evangelina from the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is striking. The daughter of the second owner of Uncle Tom St. Clair, little Evangeline, falls ill with tuberculosis and quickly fades away, just like Zosima’s brother Markel, described in the life of Elder Zosima, compiled from his words by Alexei. When Zosima was still a boy, his brother Markel, eight years older than him, suddenly fell ill with tuberculosis. A serious illness and the proximity of death changed Markel - he became very kind and sympathetic, as if the imminent inevitability of death had reborn him. Markel said shortly before his death "to the incoming servants<>every minute: “My dears. Dear ones, why do you serve me, and am I worth serving? If God had mercy and left you alive, I would serve you myself, for everyone must serve one another.”. In Uncle Tom's Cabin we read: “And how Evangelina pitied the devoted servants, in whose lives she was a bright ray!<>She wanted to do something for the blacks - to save them - all of them, not just her own, and this hot impulse of will represented such a sad contrast with her fragile appearance.”. Markel told his mother: “Mom, my joy,<>It is impossible for there to be no masters and servants, but let me be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And I’ll also tell you, mother, that everyone is to blame for everything before everyone else, and I am more than anyone.”.

Evangelina says almost the same as Markel, the only difference being that she is a little girl and lives in a country where people of a different race are slaves. Eve once said:

- Uncle Tom<>I understand why Christ wanted to die for us.<>It’s hard for me to explain, but when I saw those unfortunate people on the ship... and you... remember? Some broke up with their mothers, some with their husbands, mothers mourned their children... When I found out about poor Prue and much more - how terrible it all was! - then it became clear to me that I would die with joy, if only my death would atone for all these misfortunes. Ah, Tom! If only I could die for them". Markel, as Zosima told Alexei, “He beckoned to me, when he saw me, I approached him, he took me by the shoulders with both hands, looked into my face tenderly, lovingly; He didn’t say anything, he just looked at him for a minute: “Well, he says, go now, play, live for me.”.

As we can see, the content of some scenes and characters in The Brothers Karamazov were influenced by those scenes in two American novels about slavery, where the slave is the son of his master, and where the master and his guests make fun of the slave who serves them dishes, as they have lunch or dinner . The influence can also be seen in the character and words of Markel and the coincidence of such slave qualities as professionalism and honesty. Yes, Smerdyakov was depicted by F. Dostoevsky from a completely different position than Archie or Uncle Tom - Smerdyakov is cunning and perverted, and, apparently, F. Dostevsky understood the influence of slavery as an outrage against the human soul. As a result, the “slave” and lackey of F. Dostoevsky’s novel began to possess far from noble qualities. But we can also read about this in the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, where, according to the glory of the owner Uncle Tom, who gives a general description of all slaves, slaves are perverted and crafty, and, interestingly, Smerdyakov can also be characterized in his words. One day Saint Clair was asked a question - Are there really no honest people among your slaves?” to which Saint Clair replied: “No, why? Occasionally one comes across those who, by their natural simplicity, impracticality and devotion, are able to resist the most evil influence. But do you see what's the matter? Negro children absorb with their mother's milk the confidence that straight paths are reserved for them. They are disingenuous with their parents, with the mistress, with the master's children - their playmates. Cunning and deceit inevitably become their habit.<>As for honesty, we treat slaves like little children and keep them in such a dependent position that they do not understand the rights of property, and therefore it costs them nothing to extend their hand to their master’s goods. For example, I can’t imagine how they can be honest. Tom is such a miracle among them.”.

F. Dostoevsky, obviously, had no idea either, and his lackey Smerdyakov is no exception. Therefore, he not only extends his hand to his master’s goods, but also raises it against his master. It seems that “The Brothers Karamazov” is also a novel about slavery, but only in it, in the person of Smerdyakov, the most typical slave is described, who did not become an exception and a miracle, like Uncle Tom.

References

1. Beecher Stowe G. "Uncle Tom's Cabin", Kyiv, 1987.
2. Dostoevsky F.M. “The Brothers Karamazov”, volume fourteen, Complete works in thirty volumes, Leningrad, 1976.
3. Dostoevsky F.M. “The Brothers Karamazov”, volume fifteen, Complete works in thirty volumes, Leningrad, 1976.
4. Hildreth R. “White Slave”, http://lib.rus.ec/b/141218/read

Lizaveta Stinking is a beggar, she is very short, stupid, she is a holy fool. Being pregnant, she comes to Fyodor Karamazov's house and gives birth to a son. The whole city is sure that Fedor is his father. The boy is raised by the valet Grigory and his wife Marfa, now he is a footman in the Karamazov house. His last name is Smerdyakov. He is a lackey, but at the same time everyone thinks that he is one of the Karamazov brothers. There is something unpleasant and repulsive about him.

As a child, Smerdyakov loved to hang cats and give them funerals. He wrapped himself in a sheet, pretended to wave a censer, and sang. Grigory saw Smerdyakov playing at the funeral and flogged him. Then he hid in the corner of the room and looked at Gregory with a hateful eye for a week. As Grigory correctly feels, Smerdyakov is not capable of loving anyone. He is incapable of love and joy.

Having matured, this hero shows remarkable cooking abilities, goes to study in Moscow, and upon his return becomes a cook in the Karamazov house. He is painfully committed to cleanliness when he eats, carefully examining the contents of the soup plate, holding up a piece of bread to the light and only then starting to eat. This same morbid disgust apparently has something to do with his meticulousness in clothing, which is not characteristic of a home-grown cook. He wears a neat frock coat and white shirt, cleans his clothes twice a day, and his smart shoes are polished to a shine. He spends most of his salary on looking like a dandy. He wears hair pomade and perfume.

At the same time, Smerdyakov (“The Brothers Karamazov”) does not have fun with women. He despises and hates them. However, this applies not only to women, but to people in general. Due to his contempt, he does not speak first. There is no healthy good nature about him; his speeches are pure hatred. He admits that he hates all of Russia. After returning from Moscow, he somehow immediately ages, wrinkles, and his face becomes covered with wrinkles. With a fair amount of irony, Dostoevsky calls this twenty-four-year-old anemic and lacking in freshness young man a contemplative.

This slippery, tasteless and cold man, who does not know what it is to think, was for Dostoevsky one of the representatives of that part of the Russian people who is in mental darkness. The painter Mikolka (“Crime and Punishment”) is the same in this regard - he came to St. Petersburg from the village, his eyes look in different directions. Once Smerdyakov (“The Brothers Karamazov”) went to the theater in Moscow, but returned disappointed. In imitation of others, he wears lipstick and perfume, but theater does not fit into his head.

After his host Fyodor finishes his meal, Smerdyakov is allowed to stand near the table. He always listens to what Alyosha and Fyodor are talking about after eating. He listens intently to Ivan’s atheistic speeches that “everything is allowed.” This is how he masters “science.”

Smerdyakov feels that the educated Ivan also does not like people, and he feels a kinship with him. Smerdyakov had never talked to the owner about “mental” topics before. Now he suddenly fell in love with reasoning. He develops his strange ideas, turning to Grigory, who raised him, but in reality he wants Ivan’s attention.

When Fyodor suddenly became angry with Smerdyakov the sophist and drove him away from the table, he called him “Balaam’s donkey,” in whose head something was going on that no one could understand. He asks Ivan why he attracts Smerdyakov to him so much. “Nothing at all, he decided to respect me; this is a lackey and a boor... There will be others and better ones, but there will also be such. First there will be such people, and after them there will be better ones,” Ivan answers.

That is, Ivan says that the Russian people are slowly finding their voice, and Smerdyakov is at the beginning of this path. Smerdyakov (“The Brothers Karamazov”) is a talking “Valaam’s donkey”, in whose head it is unclear what is going on. He kills Fyodor Karamazov and puts Ivan in a terrible position. Smerdyakov seems to be a fool; his train of thought has nothing in common with the logic we are accustomed to. At the same time, he demonstrates extreme prudence and cunning in implementing his plans. This is best and most horrifyingly seen in how he carried out the murder of Fyodor, feeling that this was Ivan’s secret desire. After Dmitry's arrest, Ivan comes to Smerdyakov three times, and from their conversations it becomes clear that there is a tacit agreement between them regarding the murder.

At Fyodor’s request, Ivan must go to the village of Chermashnya, but he hesitates. And only after Smerdyakov’s prodding does he agree to go there. Smerdyakov interprets this as a tacit instruction to kill Fedor during Ivan's absence.

Smerdyakov carefully monitors Ivan, who should receive part of his father's inheritance. After Fyodor's death, Dmitry, Ivan and Alyosha should receive forty thousand rubles each. But Fyodor passionately wants to marry Grushenka. If this happens, she can transfer the entire inheritance to herself. Therefore, Fedor must die before marriage. If Dmitry is found guilty of Fyodor’s death, then his share will be divided between Ivan and Alyosha.

If he, Smerdyakov, kills Fedor for the sake of Ivan, and everyone considers Dmitry a criminal, then Ivan’s secret desire will be fulfilled. In this case, Ivan will have to feel a kind of gratitude and recognize Smerdyakov as his brother. Smerdyakov foresees: if Ivan receives an inheritance, then he will have to reward Smerdyakov all his life.

This “contemplator,” this “Balaam’s donkey,” who is supposedly incapable of real thought, turns out to be truly perspicacious - he mercilessly sees everything that is going on in the depths of someone else’s soul. But Ivan swears that when he went to Chermashnya, he did not even think about any murder. “No, I swear, no! - Ivan screamed, gnashing his teeth.” That tacit agreement that Smerdyakov dreamed of turns out to be a fiction.

This turns out to be a terrible blow for Smerdyakov. He believed that behind the words of his conversation with Ivan, when he went to Chermashnya, there was hidden a meaning that only the two of them could understand. When Smerdyakov told Ivan that it was nice to talk with an intelligent person, it seemed to him that Ivan understood what he was talking about. Now it turns out that these were just his conjectures, and Smerdyakov feels deep disappointment. He is not one of the Karamazov brothers at all, he is just a pathetic lackey.

Smerdyakov gives Ivan three thousand rubles, which he stole from the bedroom of the murdered Fyodor. After Ivan leaves, he hangs himself. The death of Smerdyakov, who did not even leave a note, makes a grave impression. Smerdyakov did not like people, and it seems he did not like himself either. And life itself was hateful to him.

Karamazov, pupil and Kutuzov. This is one of the main characters of the novel - his name is included in the titles of six chapters: book. 3, ch. VI "Smerdyakov"; book 5, ch. II “Smerdyakov with a guitar”; book 11, ch. VI “First date with Smerdyakov”, ch. VII “Second visit to Smerdyakov”, ch. VIII “The third and last meeting with Smerdyakov”; book 12, ch. VIII "Treatise on Smerdyakov".

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov once, while drunk and on a dare, “caressed” the city holy fool Lizaveta Stinking, who a few months later snuck into the courtyard of his estate, gave birth to a child in the bathhouse and died. The boy was taken in by the footman Grigory and his wife, whose child had just died, they gave him the name Pavel, everyone began to call him by his patronymic (when he grew up) Fedorovich (as if confirming and legitimizing the paternity of Fedor Pavlovich), and the “speaking” surname from Old man Karamazov himself came up with his mother’s nickname. introduces Smerdyakov to the reader in detail in the first “personal” chapter: “The man was still young, only twenty-four years old, he was terribly unsociable and silent. It wasn’t that he was wild or ashamed of anything, no, on the contrary, he was arrogant in character and seemed to despise everyone.<...>Marfa Ignatievna and Grigory Vasilyevich raised him, but the boy grew up “without any gratitude,” as Grigory said about him, a wild boy and looking at the light from the corner. As a child, he loved to hang cats and then bury them with ceremony. For this he put on a sheet, which was like a vestment, and sang and waved something over the dead cat, as if he were burning incense. All this on the sly, in the greatest secrecy. Grigory caught him one day in this exercise and punished him painfully with a rod. He went into a corner and looked askance from there for a week. “He doesn’t love you and me, this monster,” Grigory said to Marfa Ignatievna, “and he doesn’t love anyone. Are you a human being,” he suddenly turned directly to Smerdyakov, “you’re not a human being, you got wound up from the phlegm of a bathhouse, that’s what you are.” ...". Smerdyakov, as it turned out later, could never forgive him for these words. Gregory taught him to read and write and, when he was twelve years old, began to teach him sacred history. But the matter ended immediately in nothing. One day, just in the second or third lesson, the boy suddenly grinned.
- What are you? - Grigory asked, looking menacingly at him from under his glasses.
- Nothing, sir. The Lord God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light shine from on the first day?
Grigory was dumbfounded. The boy looked mockingly at the teacher. There was even something arrogant in his gaze. Grigory could not stand it. "And that's where it comes from!" - he shouted and furiously hit the student on the cheek. The boy endured the slap without saying a word, but hid again in a corner for several days. It just so happened that a week later he suffered from falling sickness for the first time in his life, which did not leave him for the rest of his life.<...>Soon, Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovich that little by little a terrible disgust of some kind suddenly appeared in Smerdyakov: he sits at the soup, takes a spoon and looks and searches in the soup, bends down, looks, scoops up a spoon and lifts it to the light.<...>Fyodor Pavlovich, having heard about Smerdyakov’s new quality, immediately decided that he should be a cook, and sent him to study in Moscow. He spent several years studying and returned with a greatly changed face. He suddenly aged somehow unusually, completely disproportionately with age, he wrinkled, turned yellow, and began to look like an eunuch. Morally, he returned almost the same as before leaving for Moscow: he was still unsociable and did not feel the slightest need for anyone’s company. Even in Moscow, as they later reported, he remained silent; Moscow itself somehow interested him extremely little, so he only recognized something in it and paid no attention to everything else. I even went to the theater once, but returned silently and with displeasure. But he came to us from Moscow in a good dress, in a clean frock coat and underwear, he very carefully cleaned his dress with a brush, invariably twice a day, and he loved to clean his fluffy, smart boots with a special English polish so that they sparkled like a mirror . He turned out to be an excellent cook. Fyodor Pavlovich gave him a salary, and Smerdyakov used almost all of this salary on clothes, lipstick, perfume, and so on. But he seemed to despise the female sex just as much as he did the male sex, and behaved sedately, almost inaccessibly, towards them.<...>Once it happened that Fyodor Pavlovich, drunk, dropped in the mud in his own yard three rainbow-colored pieces of paper that he had just received and missed them the next day: he had just rushed to look in his pockets, and suddenly all three rainbow-colored ones were already lying on his table. Where? Smerdyakov picked it up and brought it yesterday. “Well, brother, I’ve never seen anyone like you,” Fyodor Pavlovich snapped and gave him ten rubles. It must be added that he was not only confident in his honesty, but for some reason he even loved him, although the fellow looked at him as askance as he did at others, and remained silent. He rarely spoke. If at that time someone had decided to ask, looking at him, what this guy is interested in and what is most often on his mind, then it would have been impossible to decide this by looking at him. Meanwhile, sometimes in the house, or even in the yard or on the street, he would sometimes stop, think, and stand there for ten minutes at a time. A physiognomist, having looked at him, would say that there is no thought or thought here, but just some kind of contemplation...”

The portrait of Smerdyakov is very colorful just before his death, when Ivan Karamazov visited him in the hospital: “From the very first glance at him, Ivan Fedorovich was undoubtedly convinced of his complete and extreme painful condition: he was very weak, spoke slowly and seemed to be moving his tongue with difficulty ; He lost a lot of weight and turned yellow. During the entire twenty minutes of the meeting he complained of a headache and pain in all his limbs. His scopal, dry face seemed so small, his temples were unkempt, and instead of a tuft, only a thin strand of hair stuck up. But the left eye, narrowed and as if hinting at something, betrayed the old Smerdyakov. “It’s interesting to talk to an intelligent person,” Ivan Fedorovich immediately remembered...

It was not by chance that I remembered this: it was precisely Smerdyakov’s conversation with the “smart” Ivan, with omissions, hints, subtext, that gave rise to the lackey’s confidence that Ivan Fedorovich wanted their father dead, and pushed Smerdyakov to kill Fyodor Pavlovich. Smerdyakov ends his life voluntarily - in a shameful noose. But, on the other hand, with his self-execution he seems to atone for part of his guilt. Smerdyakov goes through his “crucible of doubts,” being in atheism, but suffering subconsciously without faith, and in this respect he is a mirror-double of the atheist Ivan Karamazov. But in general and in general, the fourth of the brothers, the lackey Smerdyakov, is the embodied temptation and sin of the Karamazovs. The main disgusting “stinking” thing, which is why the name of this lackey became a household name in the first place, is contained in the phrase of conviction he expressed to his “sweetheart”: “I hate all of Russia, Marya Kondratievna...” The same one that Smerdyakov allowed hopes to be entertained about himself and in whose house he later hanged himself, he spoke in the garden with a guitar about how good it would be for Russia if Napoleon had conquered it in 1812...

Smerdyakov is one of Dostoevsky’s five epileptic heroes (along with, and): his “timely” seizure plays a significant role in the plot and plot of the novel. The direct predecessor of Smerdyakov in the world of Dostoevsky was the footman.

The article was supported by the Russian Humanitarian Foundation grant No. 15-34-01258 “The concept of the East in fiction and journalism by F.M. Dostoevsky"

In one of the episodes of the last novel by F.M. Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" (1878-1880), the illegitimate son of the landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and, concurrently, his lackey Pavel Smerdyakov, uttered a phrase that later became the personification of the so-called. “Smerdyakovism” - pathological hatred of everything Russian: “I hate all of Russia<…>The Russian people need to be flogged, sir<…>In the twelfth year there was a great invasion of Russia by Emperor Napoleon the First of France, the father of the present one, and it would be good if these same French had conquered us then: a smart nation would have conquered a very stupid one and annexed it to itself. There would even be completely different orders, sir.” In Dostoevsky’s system of religious and philosophical concepts, Smerdyakov’s ingratiation with Europe and the humiliation of the Russian world are assessed unconditionally negatively.

As a rule, Smerdyakovism is considered in the context of nihilism and Westernism - widespread socio-philosophical phenomena of the second half of the 19th century, which are based on the dichotomy “Russia - Europe” (a variant of the broader dichotomy “Russia - West”) [See, for example: 2, p. . 16-19]. However, this question is actually somewhat broader than it seems at first glance. If we compare Smerdyakov’s personality with his most significant statements, which express his worldview, we can see that two structure-forming problems occupy an important place in the resulting system: epilepsy and apostasy.

Both of these problems are directly related to each other and are the basic elements of Dostoevsky’s Orientalism, introducing an obligatory reference to the East into Russian-European relations: it was reflection on these problems that determined the value architectonics of the author’s Orientalist constructions, positioning Russia in a world imaginarily divided into West and East, into the territory of order and chaos, into the colonized and the colonizing principle.

From the point of view of the West, Russia is one of the varieties of the East it imagines, a country that resists civilization, a country without laws and moral standards, sharply divided into masters and slaves. And if the masters are certainly cruel and capricious, as befits eastern tyrants, then the slaves are cunning and evil, understanding only the language of the whip. This attitude towards the eastern colonies allowed the Western European empires not to consider the aboriginal population in a humanistic way and to destroy them if economic interests required it. Essentially, Western European Orientalism is a discourse of self-justification for the metropolis, it is the development of a language for describing “strangers” that would contribute to the viability of the imperial discourse through the constant affirmation of the status opposition between the colonized and the colonizing.

In Russian Orientalism, which borrowed the main imperial paradigms of Western Europe, the language of describing “strangers” in the 19th century acquired a significantly different ontological content: while serving as the center of power and enlightenment (i.e., the West) for its outskirts, St. Petersburg still remained a space of chaos and despotism (i.e. the East) for its European neighbors. This dual status led to the fact that every philosophically generalized judgment about Russia and “Russianness”, about some kind of unique Russian world, certainly appealed to one of two mechanisms for the formation of Russian national identity: orientalization and self-orientalization. If orientalization is a description of “strangers” in which they acquire typologically eastern features (inertness, laziness, aggressiveness, despoticism, servility, voluptuousness, inability to enlightenment, dull religiosity, etc.), then self-orientalization is a description of one’s own people as typologically eastern for the purpose of self-criticism. Examples of self-orientalization can be found in P.Ya. Chaadaeva, A.S. Pushkina, V.G. Belinsky, I.S. Turgeneva and others. However, despite all the promise of the term, in domestic humanities, in contrast to Western [See, for example: 5; 6], it is little used.

The closest related term is “internal colonization”, used in the works of A. Etkind. In D. Uffelmann’s article, the terms “self-orientalization” and “internal colonization” constitute a single formula for the destructive development of national identity: “External Orientalization (External Orientalization) of culture can cause some of its representatives react with subversive-ironic self-orientalization, as if on purpose, out of spite from the outside (SamOr) or serve as an impetus for self-colonization (SamKol). In the latter case, dissociation from one’s own culture almost inevitably occurs and internal Orientalism (InOr) arises in relation to “others” within this culture. This internal Orientalism can remain at a negative distance or take a distant-reformist, that is, colonialist position in relation to “regrettable others,” which will result in internal colonization (VnuKol).”

Self-orientalization, described by Uffelmann, was a common place in the debate between Westerners and Slavophiles, but Dostoevsky filled this problem with a special meaning. E. Thomson rightly noted that “Dostoevsky never felt the irony of writing novels about moral dilemmas while his readers were involved in violence abroad.” In the course of many years of discussions about the Russian world and its place in world culture, Dostoevsky did not attach a negative meaning to some parameters described in the discourse of Orientalism as “oriental” and backward. For example, a conscious and hard-won affiliation with the Eastern Church (Orthodoxy), a willingness to sacrifice European freedoms and values ​​for the sake of the monarchical system ordained by God was tantamount to the concept of “Russianness” for him, while for Belinsky it was, on the contrary, a sign of “Asianness” (cf. . the famous Salzbrunn letter of V.G. Belinsky to N.V., for reading which Dostoevsky, in fact, went to hard labor).

Dostoevsky's Orientalism was initially associated with the problem of civilizational self-determination of Russia in a tribalist vein. In Dostoevsky’s mind, the idea of ​​the greatness of Russia clearly developed in a providential manner: after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia could not take any other path than the path of an Orthodox empire expanding in all directions. Interesting is Dostoevsky’s unrealized plan on this topic, set out in a letter to A.N. Maikov dated May 15 (27), 1869: he pictures in his imagination the Sultan “Mohammed the 2nd”, who, after the capture of Constantinople, joyfully turns the St. Sophia Cathedral into a mosque, and at this time “a Russian wedding, Prince Ivan III in his wooden hut instead of a palace, and into this wooden hut the great idea about the pan-Orthodox significance of Russia is transferred, and the first stone is laid about the future primacy in the East, the circle of Russian future expands, the idea is laid not only of a great state, but also of a whole new world, which is destined to renew the Christianity of the pan-Slavic the Orthodox idea and introduce a new thought into humanity when the West rots, and it will rot when the Pope completely distorts Christ and thereby gives rise to atheism in the desecrated Western humanity.”

The motives of Smerdyakov’s epilepsy and readiness for apostasy (loss of “Russianness”) help to understand the positioning of the writer’s moral and philosophical imperatives in the discourse of Russian Orientalism.

The problem of epilepsy for Dostoevsky himself had an important identification significance: he not only recorded in his notebooks most of the seizures that happened to him, keeping a kind of anthropological record of them, but also tried to comprehend this problem from the position of a writer and philosopher. If epilepsy is a kind of “sacred mark” of many famous historical figures (Emperor Constantine, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Mohammed, etc.), then there was an urgent need to take it beyond the brackets of ordinary pathology. In the novels “The Idiot” and “Demons,” the epileptic characters Myshkin and Kirillov help the writer talk about the insight of the world and moments of eternal harmony [See: 1, vol. 8, p. 188-189, 195; 1, vol. 10, p. 450], which precede an epileptic seizure - this is important for the self-identification of Dostoevsky the citizen and Dostoevsky the writer. The connection between the problem of epilepsy and the image of Mohammed, perceived in the Russian literary tradition after Pushkin not as a false prophet, but as a talented poet, suggests an obvious prophetic code, very significant for Dostoevsky.

However, this same code undoubtedly indicates that epilepsy can be a true and false sign of genius: it forms a special mindset that sets a person apart from the mass of others, but this mindset can be aimed at both creation and destruction - this is evidenced by for example, the semantic connection “Napoleon-Mohammed” in the novel “Crime and Punishment” [See: 1, vol. 6, p. 211-212]. Like Mohammed, Napoleon in the minds of Dostoevsky had equally the desire for great achievements and contempt for individual “trembling creatures.” Therefore, epilepsy opens up the problem of true and false principles in man, true and false prophecy. In this problem, the epileptic Myshkin occupies the positive pole, drawing closer to Christ, and the epileptic Smerdyakov is located in the negative zone, undoubtedly drawing closer to Mohammed: from a logical point of view, Smerdyakov absolutely convincingly proved that there would be no sin in accepting Islam under duress and thus most to save your life. In an episode of this conversation, Dostoevsky clarifies one idea that is significant for him: Russian faith cannot be rational, and a Russian person, in all his contradictions, cannot be a complete scoundrel if he retains the feeling of God in himself. Smerdyakov, from childhood, was able to see biblical contradictions, looking at the sacred text from the standpoint of reason, and this allowed him to perceive the Christian and Muslim faiths from the outside, as if he were a European who accidentally ended up in Skotoprigonyevsk, and not the son of a village clique and a depraved Russian master .

Thus, the enlightenment (originally European) concept of “ratio” takes on a negative connotation in Dostoevsky’s artistic system: Smerdyakov, like many great figures, is endowed with the ability not only to think logically and deeply, but also to act, contrary to Raskolnikov, without much remorse. With such traits, he could become a brilliant politician, conquistador or inquisitor (“advanced meat, however, when the time comes,” is how Ivan Karamazov characterizes him), but Dostoevsky deprives him of such an opportunity, since his self-orientalization does not contribute to growth, but to moral and , then, physical death in the context of the Judas motif complex. In the image of Smerdyakov’s “Valaam’s donkey,” Dostoevsky fundamentally destroys the self-orientalization strategies of Westerners, showing their inconsistency with the “Russian principle,” which in its foundations is closer to the Eastern than to the Western type of world order.

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