“Zero” world of holy fools in F.M. Dostoevsky's novels

The theme of holy foolishness in works of F. M. Dostoevsky has been studied thoroughly by literary scholars. However, the very term «holy fool» is rather vague. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that the public and church perception of holy fools changed in the culture of the modern period. On the other hand, F. M. Dostoevsky’s position on holy fools is ambiguous. In the article an attempt is made to relate M. M. Bakhtin’s propositions concerning originality of the writer’s poetics to peculiarity of F. M. Dostoevsky’s depiction of holy fools. The author considers transformation of traditional elements of the holy foolishness phenomenon, draws attention to mutual influence of space and time of the world of holy fools and the writer’s poetics, storyline and compositional structure of his novels. Images of holy fools undergo transformation in artistic interpretation, but also cause transformation of some essential elements of the novels, making storyline and compositional structure of the novels, as well as relations within the system of images, more complicated.