Strakhov, the journal Zarya and F. M. Dostoevsky’s works at the end of the 1860s

Abstract

The article examines the significance of Nikolai Strakhov and the journal Zarya for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works at the end of the 1860s, in particular, for the poetics of the story The Eternal Husband. Strakhov’s well-known review of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace and the range of his writings on problems of psychology is analyzed in the article. The context of Strakhov’s works allow us to investigate the specifics of the mechanism for creating the image of an “eternal husband” in the writer’s story (the problem of the “predatory” and “meek” types) and consider the features of Dostoevsky’s psychological realism through the prism of Strakhov’s scientific developments, which have not yet been updated in Dostoevsky studies. Analysis of the poetics of dreams and the problem of will in the context of Strakhov’s objectively idealistic approach allows us to interpret them in accordance with the author’s modality of Dostoevsky’s creative laboratory. The study revealed the multidimensional character of the “eternal husband” type realized by Dostoevsky in the image of the Trusotsky type, which includes the typological features of the cuckold, the underground man and the dreamer. The conducted research makes it possible, at the present stage, to fill in the gaps that exist in the source study base of Dostoevsky studies.