The manuscript of Ippolit Terentyev in the novel “The Idiot” by F. M. Dostoevsky: genre and narrative strategies

The manuscript of Ippolit Terentyev “My Indispensable Explication”, referred to as an “article” or a “notebook” in Dostoevsky’s novel, is traditionally seen as a confession in literary studies. Meanwhile, the genre and narrative structure of Ippolit’s manuscript is not homogeneous, but multilayer. The conjugacy of various discursive strategies of justifications of the “last conviction” of the ideological self-destroyer in the text, from the viewpoint of the logic of the conscious (thesis) and subconscious and “true live” (antithesis), enlarges genre limits of the confessional word. The idea of the human right to commit suicide appears in the manuscript in the form of the number of conclusions in the narration that rather resembles a philosophical and publicistic discourse, the convincing and fervent emotional manner of which refers us to the genre of a preaching text. The logic of the subconscious of a dying young man appeals to the images of Apocalypses and non-existence penetrating into the night fantasy narration. The fear of death and the loss of faith are embodied in a discursive strategy of ecphrasis. The logic of the “true life” penetrating into the narration manifests itself in the scenes of reality, that appear in the text as the cut-in novelettes containing narrative strategies of a physiological essay, psychological sketch and moralizing story. The conducted analysis specifies the ideas about genre and narrative structure of the “article” of Ippolit, the largest and most important one for comprehension of the whole novel of a cutin construction.