The motif of the “fateful inheritance” in “The idiot” by F. M. Dostoevsky: a real, mythopoetic and historico-literary commentary

The motif of the “fateful inheritance” in the novel “The Idiot” by F. M. Dostoevsky is discussed in the article from three viewpoints: first, its facts related to the Moscow world of the Kumanin family, many members of which became prototypes of the characters of the novel are commented; second, the “Kumanin’s trace” is evidentiated in its plot. The real commentary is accompanied with the analysis of a mythopoetic model of the inheritance motif implementation. Its attributes are the “bundle” in the hands of Knyaz Myshkin (Knyaz is a historical Slavic title, used both as a royal and noble title in different times of history and different ancient Slavic lands) and the “case” (“letter”), which are “mysteriously” interlinked. A chain connection between these details in the novel reflects a consistent plot development of the motif of the fatal inheritance, elaborated in accordance with a cumulative logic of the solution to a folkloric riddle. Another characteristic feature of its mythopoetics is a symbolic parallelism of destinies and characters of Rogozhin and Myshkin. Third, the article reveals the connection between the inheritance motif in Dostoevsky’s text and the literary tradition, primarily with the works of L. Tolstoy and Balzac. Thus, the parodic reactualization of an early essay “Unhappy” written by the French writer in the libel of Keller and Lebedev marks Dostoevsky’s transition to an “eminent realism”, that is confirmed by the general dynamics of the work upon the “Idiot”, that is finally reduced to the synthesis of personal experience with literary tradition and cultural memory. As a result, the article comes to a conclusion that during the process of an artistic implementation of the fateful inheritance motif in the novel “Idiot” there took place a contamination of the autobiographical narrative with the corresponding folkloric-mythological and literary models.