THE INFLUENCE OF FOLKLORIC MOTIFS ON THE FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL CHARACTER IN FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S NOVELS AND THEIR REFLECTION IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN PROSE

Abstract

The article highlights the role of folkloric motifs in shaping the national character in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novels and their transformation in contemporary Russian prose. The relevance of the study stems from the fact that Dostoevsky’s oeuvre is viewed as a key element of Russia’s cultural code, wherein recourse to folklore is not decorative but ontological in nature. Folkloric archetypes – the double, the holy fool, and Mother Damp Earth – serve as symbolic structures through which the writer interprets the dialectic of Russian national consciousness, which unites Christian and native-soil foundations. The methodological framework of the research comprises M.M. Bakhtin’s concepts of the polyphonic novel and carnivalization, hermeneutic and comparative-historical analysis, as well as a cultural-anthropological approach. The material analyzed includes the novels of Dostoevsky’s “great pentalogy” and his early novella The Double, as well as works of Russian postmodernist prose, primarily the novels of Viktor Pelevin, in which classical archetypes are subjected to ironic deconstruction. The results of the analysis show that the archetype of the double expresses the spiritual split of the personality and a crisis of identity; the holy fool embodies the ideal of humility and non-rational truth; and Mother Damp Earth symbolizes the moral law and spiritual rebirth. Carnivalesque poetics, rooted in the culture of popular laughter, enables Dostoevsky to create a dialogic space where opposing worldviews enter into polyphonic interaction. In contemporary prose these archetypes do not disappear, but undergo transformation: tragic seriousness gives way to an ironic play with simulacra. In Pelevin, doubleness becomes the norm of existence in the virtual world, the search for a “positively beautiful person” becomes a marketing project, and the idea that “everything is permitted” becomes an axiom of consumer society. Thus, the study identifies a diachronic shift from a metaphysical model of the national character in Dostoevsky to postmodernist deconstruction in contemporary prose. This process reflects changes in national self-consciousness, in which classical archetypes are preserved but interpreted through the prism of irony and cultural play.