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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Veröffentlicht in:	Studies in East European thought Jg. 77; H. 5; S. 955 - 980
1. Verfasser:	Horváth, Géza
Format:	Journal Article
Sprache:	Englisch
Veröffentlicht:	Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2025 Springer Nature B.V
Schlagworte:	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-Zugang:	Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:	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.
Bibliographie:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14
ISSN:	0925-9392 1573-0948
DOI:	10.1007/s11212-024-09698-3