Formation of the chronotope in the “A writer’s diary” by Dostoevsky in 1873 (chapters “Introduction”, “Old people”)

The category of “chronotope” introduced into literary criticism by M. M. Bakhtin is one of the most studied in recent times. The researcher is considered the founder of the term, but the authorship of the concept belongs to A. A. Ukhtomsky, who used it when developing the doctrine of the dominant at the beginning of the 20th century. Thanks to the works of Bakhtin, “chronotope” has become a common term. In the 1980s-1990s. for the first time there are publications about the poetics of the chronotope in the works of Russian and foreign literature. Especially significant is the study of the chronotope as a category of ethnopoetics. Since the late 1980s works are published in which the chronotope is presented as an image of the national picture of the world. Bakhtin’s research on Dostoevsky’s poetics opened up new frontiers for studying the writer's works from the point of view of spatio-temporal structure. In the “A Writer’s Diary” of 1873, a complex chronotopic hierarchy appears. So, in the first chapters, conditionally real and fantasy chronotopes are distinguished, within which there are more local ones: Chinese, Herzenian, symbolic, St. Petersburg, etc. Dostoevsky creates an artistic chronotope that exists in the space of utterance, speech. The chronotope of the “A Writer’s Diary” differs from real time-space. They are not identical. The poetics of the chronotope is complicated by the fact that the Diary is part of a time-based publication. In (“Grazhdanin”) “The Citizen”, Dostoevsky’s column was the ideological core of the weekly. Thematically, not only the chapters of the “A Writer’s Diary” were connected, but also all the articles in the issue, so Dostoevsky needed to conceptually provide for the problems of the rubric and the issue as a whole.