“Abominably I don't want to mimic people”. About one ambiguous phrase from preparatory materials to the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky “Crime and punishment”

The article analyzes the phrase from the preparatory materials to F. M. Dostoevsky's novel “Crime and Punishment” published in the seventh volume of his Complete Works in 30 volumes, uttered by the main character of the novel Rodyon Raskolnikov: “Abominably I don't want to mimic people”. To prove the thesis that reproduced as it is the phrase ideologically contradicts all other Dostoevsky's texts, including the final version of the novel, we rely on a number of theories that consider text ambiguity in linguistic and literary aspects. We demonstrate that the draft phrase is of a different textual nature than the printed text of the novel. It could have contained omitted punctuation marks, letters or words; these possible omissions are not misspellings but constitute a natural element of the autocommunication format chosen by the writer, that is a fast recording of artistic ideas in a reduced mnemonic form. We arrive at the conclusion that this phrase is wrongly presented in the above mentioned edition and assert that it should be read either as: “It is abominable / I don't want to mimic people" or “It is abominable to mimic people, I don't want this”. Hence the mark “/” designating the place where there should be a comma, a full-stop or a semicolon in the printed edition.