The concept of family in the meaning-making structure and poetics of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and punishment

The article deals with the concept of family and its function in the poetics of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. The authors analyze the fragments of the novel where this concept offamily is objectified through lexemes comprising the nucleus of its nominal field as well as through the author’s elements which expand this concept. The analysis reveals both individual author’s characteristics of the concept of family and its attributes traditional for the Russian linguistic picture of the world (unity, mercy, decency). Investigating the city environment and living conditions after the reforms, Dostoevsky focuses on the moral and social aspects of family relations, therefore, such attributes as illness, poverty, destruction, unhappiness, slavery, and disease play an important role in the enrichment of the concept’s axiological content. Actualization of these attributes enables Dostoevsky to portray the tragedy of the Russian family decay and the extent of this tendency. Differentiation and simultaneous actualization of several mutually exclusive attributes in the novel suggest that the author strove to show not only the breakdown of the society but also ways out of the crisis. It can be concluded that the concept offamily is one of the crucial meaning-making concepts of Crime and Punishment, revealed on several important levels of the text poetics (genre, composition, plot, and the system of characters).