The concept ‘demon’ in the works by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The article deals with the concept ‘demon’ in the works by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is found in various grammatical forms in the writer's works published in magazines in 1861 and 1877, in the story The Mistress, as well as in the novels The Idiot and Demons. In Dostoevsky's letters, this concept is not given a single mention. The paper reveals a number of specific features in the use of the concept by the writer. First, locality and compactness - the concept is always used within the same topic (in works published in magazines) or scene (in fiction). Second, the concept does not have any romantic connotation traditional for European and Russian literature; the writer always uses it in its main meaning fixed by the Church Slavonic language, where a demon is understood as an immaterial intelligent creature that is hostile to man. We consider these features to be related to the writer’s Orthodox worldview, which determined his ontology, epistemology and speech tactics. According to the Orthodox tradition, the use of the names of evil spirits should be extremely limited, therefore Dostoevsky used this concept only when it was impossible to express the idea otherwise without loss of meaning. In the writer's works published in magazines in 1861, the concept ‘demon’ is represented through the lexemes ‘Mephistopheles’ and ‘mephistophelity’, which serve to denote the apostasy processes of the Russian reality contemporary with the writer. In the novel Demons, this concept is represented through the lexeme ‘imp’, used to denote the spirit of the lower hierarchy in relation to a demon. The paper concludes that the concept ‘demon’ and the subordinate lexemes are used by Dostoevsky to depict the spiritual state of a character or to identify the spiritual causes of a particular social phenomenon.