THE DUAL NATURE OF WOMAN AND TWO FORMS OF LOVE IN THE WORKS OF F. M. DOSTOEVSKY

Annotation

In the novel “The Idiot” one of the main themes is the description of the essence of a woman. According to Dostoevsky, a woman has a perfect, divine beginning and an earthly, carnal beginning, respectively, there are two types of love — mystical, spiritual, divine, on the one hand, and carnal, earthly, on the other. Dostoevsky depicts the predominance of the first and second beginnings in a woman respectively through the images of the heroines of the novel “The Idiot” — Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchina. Each woman has both beginnings, and the main problem of her existence is the coordination of these two dimensions of her essence. The love between Nastasya Filippovna and Prince Myshkin is shown as mystical love, it is very similar to the mystical mystery of the “bridal chamber”, depicted in the Gnostic apocrypha — The Gospel of Philip. But the earthly beginning of the heroine requires passionate love, which is expressed in her relationship with Rogozhin. The heroes of the novel “The Idiot” were unable to solve the problem of reconciling the two forms of love in their lives, but the writer still believed in the possibility of such reconciliation. In his later works (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”, “The Brothers Karamazov”) Dostoevsky came to the pessimistic conclusion that this problem is insoluble, which means that it is impossible to achieve perfection in human life.

Keywords

the novel “The Idiot”, the divine and earthly essence of a woman, passionate and mystical love, the Gnostic model of man

Literature

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