Writing and iconicity in The Idiot: towards Dostoevsky’ s graphopoetics

Dostoevsky’s discourse in The Idiot is aimed—and this is his main artistic task—at developing the artistic language of a previously unknown world, of the singular human experience unfolding within the novel, rather than at conveying a finished, completed plot. The focus of this paper is on the proce...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studies in East European thought Vol. 77; no. 5; pp. 955 - 980
Main Author: Horváth, Géza
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2025
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Calligraphy
Discourse
Drafts
Education
French literature
Genre
Heroism & heroes
History
Iconicity
Ideograms
Intertextuality
Language
Novels
Philosophy
Poetics
Political Philosophy
Political Science
Russian literature
Semiotics
Writing
Corporeality
Book of Revelation
Writing
Visuality
Pascal
Dostoevsky’s graphopoetics
Motifs (point/dot, line, cross, knife)
Literary anthropology
ISSN:0925-9392, 1573-0948
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Dostoevsky’s discourse in The Idiot is aimed—and this is his main artistic task—at developing the artistic language of a previously unknown world, of the singular human experience unfolding within the novel, rather than at conveying a finished, completed plot. The focus of this paper is on the process of constructing this new symbolic language of self-understanding, which can be approached through an analysis of the unique interplay of textuality, visuality and corporeality in this novel and in the genre of the modern novel. This paper shall examine the crucial role played by Dostoevsky’s drawings and calligraphy in the poetics of The Idiot in the context of the genesis of this novel, in order to show that the “ideograms” that appear in sketches and drafts are saturated with metaphorical meaning and thus become text- and plot-forming motifs and discursive signs. This new discourse of the novel incorporates several other literary works at the level of intertextuality (specifically Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Victor Hugo’s novel The Last Day of the Condemned Man ), and in this way recalls the genre specificity of the modern novel and the creative processes of text and plot creation.
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ISSN:0925-9392
1573-0948
DOI:10.1007/s11212-024-09698-3