The "Art of Living" of the XVIII century in F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "Uncle's Dream": the collapse of a behavioral model (to help a teacher-researcher)

Abstract

The article examines the systemic reflection in F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "Uncle's Dream" of the traditions of literature and culture of the XVIII century, associated with the moral, philosophical and artistic phenomenon of the "art of living", which determined the aesthetics and behavioral practices of the Rococo era. By highlighting this polemical plan in the story, it becomes possible to combine different levels of its poetics: intertextual saturation, total irony, and the plot's "logic of the absurd" based on the destruction of the characters' life plans and behavioral strategies. Rococo as a style that was defined, on the one hand, by the ideas of lightness, grace and play, and, on the other, by a sense of the transience of existence, its ephemerality in comparison with the impending chaos, becomes in Dostoevsky's story both an object of creative experiment and ironic debunking. In addition to evaluating the narrator, two different versions of the implementation of the behavioral strategy of the "art of living" are offered in the images of Prince and Maria Alexandrovna Moskaleva. As a result, both the "test of death" and the "test of life" embedded in this compositional logic, the fatal life paradigm does not work. In Dostoevsky, the lightness and playful character of Rococo turn into absurdity; the identification of the mechanisms of this process makes it possible to understand the specifics of the search for a new artistic style, which was most significant for the writer in the late 1850s and early 1860s. This article will help a research teacher in studying and teaching Dostoevsky's work, in general, Russian literature.