Dostoevsky and East

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issue of F.M. Dostoevsky's works reading through the prism of Eastern religious philosophy and culture. The methodological basis of the study is presented by system-integrated approach, whose task (among other things) is to expand the problematic field of a desired product, introduce it simultaneously into a wide range of sources in order to understand the mechanisms of an image reception. The authors of the article try to explain the artistic consciousness represented by a text in the aspects of "East centered turn" when the starting point of the analytical reading is not a usual western discourse with the pool of historical concepts and definitions of complex but the eastern knowledge. The modern literary education needs a multivariative understanding of classics based on solid, verified arguments, of course. On the one hand, this is the desire to interest a new reader, to support a developed attention to the legacy of the past. On the other hand, the multivariative approach implements the internal semantic potential which carries all major word-art phenomenon in itself and reveals it within the "long period" according to M.M. Bakhtin's term. The authors of the article take F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot" for a detailed consideration. This novel can be interpreted not only in the aspects of Western and traditional Russian ideology, but also in the eastern world. The figure of the protagonist - Prince Myshkin - is the connecting element here. The consideration of the eastern subtext allows to understand the substantive content of his words and deeds more fully.