On characters of Dostoevsky: protagonists in the polyphonic novel

The article covers some issues of how Dostoevsky incarnates protagonists and constructs a plot in his “polyphonic” (M.M. Bakhtin) novels. I show that the writer rejects a character as a focal point in the aesthetic representation of a person as well as in plot building. Indeed, emotions and passions still engulf protagonists of Dostoevsky but never constitute them. Because Dostoevsky is more interested in protagonists’ life and progress, his vision and writing is concentrated rather on an ever continuing process than on a result. Thus, a protagonist’s character is never a permanent masque which petrifies the personality but a nomination, persistently questioned and doomed to fail at one moment. In Dostoevsky prose, a literary tradition neither contains a protagonist’s identity nor facilitates the incarnation of a traditional fabula. As S.S. Averintsev stressed, the Near-Eastern aesthetics differs from the European (i.e. post-Aristotelian) one in that the first doesn’t use characters. Dostoevsky was an attentive reader of the Bible and he transferred some biblical features into his prose. Dostoevsky’s protagonists are incarnated co-soundly with the Bible. The commonality doesn’t lead to a situation where the sacral stories become precedents predetermining choices and actions of Dostoevsky’s protagonists. His prose shows an inevitably multiversal mode where biblical and secular stories hint on a possible precedent but the precedent is no more than an option. Obviously, polyphonic poetics is the most relevant form for such aesthetic vision.