M. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s assessment of The Idiot by F. Dostoevsky: From Prince Myshkin to Iudushka Golovlyov

Abstract

Today many long-established views on M. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s literary works are being reconsidered, and literary critics are looking for new approaches to understanding the satirist’s works. However, F. Dostoevsky’s influence on Saltykov-Shchedrin’s works is largely ignored by modern studies — although it is known that the satirist highly appreciated Dostoevsky’s talent and distinguished him from a number of other writers of the second half of the 19^th century, acknowledging the depth of the problems addressed by Dostoevsky in his works. The article identifies grounds for treating the image of Prince Myshkin (the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot) and the image of Iudushka Golovlyov (the protagonist in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The Golovlyov Family) as similar. In modern culture, the images of the two protagonists are considered similar in historical and literary terms — primarily as a result of a film by Vladimir Bortko (2003) and a theatre play by Kirill Serebrennikov (2005). Yet, the connections between these characters have not been studied in literary criticism. The article presents a comparative typological analysis of The Idiot and The Golovlyov Family, which opens up new perspectives in understanding Saltykov-Shchedrin’s creative legacy and shows the updated history of the Russian classical novel. The hypothesis of our study is that Saltykov-Shchedrin was inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot when writing his most famous novel The Golovlyov Family, and that Saltykov- Shchedrin kept in mind the poetics and meanings of the image of Prince Myshkin while creating the image of Iudushka Golovlyov. The article aims to present the scholarly substantiation of the proposed hypothesis.