Two Councils by A.N. Maykov in F.M. Dostoevsky’s Novel The Brothers Karamazov

The article is devoted to the issue of reception of the poems about Catholic Church written by A.N. Maykov, a close friend of F.M. Dostoevsky, in his novel The Brothers Karamazov and, above all, in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. We are talking about the poems - “The Queen’s Confessions. The Legend of the Spanish Inquisition”, “Sentence. The Legend of the Constance Council” and “The Legend of the Clermont Council”. It is “The Queen’s Confessions” which led Dostoevsky to make Seville the setting for the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. The main character of the “Sentence”, Cardinal Hermit, became the prototype of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s novel, and the main character of “The Legend of Clermont Council”, the Pilgrim Hermit, in many ways became the prototype of the unrecognized Christ from the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. The article presents significant textual parallels between Maykov’s poems and The Brothers Karamazov .