The fight of heros’ consciousnesses as ground of carnivality of Dostoevsky's early prose. (Bakhtin's legacy in the digital age)

The article analyses M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the mentality of Dostoevsky’s characters, namely, the unity of theirs dialogic and carnival life (which are considered controversial for many researchers). To highlight the wholeness of Bakhtin’s intention, the author of the article refers to the 1920s works by A.F. Losev and S.A. Askoldov. Dostoevsky’s abnormalities of mind, such as “doubles”, “listeners”, “masks” and “voices”, were shown as phenomena of “conscience”. Moreover, “conscience” is the earliest historical equivalent of “consciousness” in all European languages (G.M. Prokhorov) and in the mid-19th-century Russia. As an aesthetical concept, “conscience” explains Dostoevsky’s transition from dialogue to carnival and vice versa, and determines the group dynamics of “carnival collective”. To illustrate such suggestions, the paper conducts the analysis of struggle for “freedom of conscience” between “positively beautiful gentleman” and “ideologist hero” in Dostoevsky’s early work “Stepanchikovo Village”. Dostoevsky expanded inner conflicts of such “carnival couple” in his great novels. The so-called “carnival literature” plot (as it was selected in Bakhtin’s “Menippean” chapter) is based on characters overcoming “outer shells of selves”, customary for the characters, the author, and the readers of that particular historical period. Furthermore, Bakhtin diachronically contrasted the concept of utopian carnival by Rabelais with the realistic one by Dostoevsky. The contradictions inside the “dialogic life” of consciousness gives prospects to investigate “carnival” paradoxes of “conscience freedom society” as it was in the beginning of 20th century and in modern “digital age”.