The concept of beauty in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The idiot”

The article examines the ambivalence of the beauty of Nastasia Filippovna Barashkova, the heroine of F. M. Dostoevsky's novel “The Idiot” in the aesthetic and ethical dimensions. Compared with the previous interpretations of the image, there is great ambiguity in the writer's ideas about the beauty of the heroine. Nastasia Filippovna possesses not only physical, but also inner beauty, which causes different reactions in the characters of the novel. When solving the question of what kind of beauty can “turn the world around,” it is proposed to take into account that this transformation can be either for the better or for the worse. The power of Nastasia Filippovna's beauty, polarized between good and evil, can “overturn”/turn the world and man both towards the fatal darkness or towards the light of resurrection. Her beauty cannot be defined only in morally conflicting categories of statuesque physical or spiritual beauty. In its manifestations, it symbolizes incompleteness, which refuses to “materialize.” This is an indefinable beauty that remains a mystery.