“Dostoyevsky and possessed...”: F.M. Dostoevsky's reception in Anna Akhmatova's “Poem without a hero” and the ways of creating a polygenetic quotation

The article examines an intertextual complex from Dostoevsky’s novels in “Poem without a Hero” by Anna Akhmatova. It is shown that quotations from Dostoevsky’s works do not exist as atomic and disparate units in the semantic space of the poem, but clearly gravitate towards two compositional plot frames: a demonic ball and a suicide situation. The demonic ball frame structures a series of quotations from “The Possessed”. In Dostoevsky’s novel and in Akhmatova’s poem, the motifs of a masquerade, associated with the idea of a “literature quadrille” arise. In both cases, the masquerade correlates with demonic connotations, the similarity is enhanced by the same designation of the topos (White Hall). The isostructural nature of both masquerades also explains a number of cited convergences between “The Possessed” and poem (for example, the demonic ball is accompanied by the motif of a fatal denouement and a terrible dream). The suicide frame in “Poem Without a Hero” draws in a complex of reminiscences from Dostoevsky’s novels “The Possessed” and “Crime and Punishment”, thus forming a “polygenetic quotation” that goes back simultaneously to two sources. Thus, the image of a ghost standing in a corner space, “between a stove and a cupboard”, is projected not only on the novel “The Possessed”, but also on the situation of the arrival of a ghost in “Crime and Punishment”. The plot frame “suicide” also determines the particular quotation rapprochements of the poem with Dostoevsky’s novels. So, Stavrogin’s dream about the “Golden Age” and his terrible crime in the poem was “compressed” into a phrase (“The golden age of vision or terrible crime”). This phrase contains lexical matches with the original text and preserves the antithetical binary structure of Stavrogin’s dream. It is shown that the revealed links between Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero” and Dostoevsky’s novels represent a specific type of intertextuality, which must be considered in the context of the transmission of cultural tradition. In this perspective, the identified frames are structurally similar to text-generating models with a key attractor-seme, which attracts similar situations from the culture, embedding them in a specific plot template. In the final part of the work, an attempt is made to identify specific psycholinguistic mechanisms that ensure this process. The “unconsciousness” of quotations and the very structure of Dostoevsky’s intertext in “Poem Without a Hero” suggests that Akhmatova does not work with individual texts of Dostoevsky, but with that complex semantic field in the form of which Dostoevsky’s novels “exist” in artistic consciousness.