The poetics of the “epilogue” in the novel “The brothers Karamazov” by F. M. Dostoevsky

The article analyses the poetics of the “Epilogue” in “The Brothers Karamazov” as a generalizing conclusion of the novel. The situations of each of three scenes in the “Epilogue” match up the situations in the main chapter of the novel, opposite one to another, and are, in comparison to the latter, negation of the negation. At the end of the novel a Christian idea emerges, and the principles of Conciliarism and its Easter character come to the peak accomplishing, thus, their evolution. The events depicted in the “Epilogue” relate to the present time but they also have a way out in future that is look up to a new, “key” novel conceived but not written by Dostoevsky. This combination of present and future in final stories attributes a dual nature to them: they finish the written novel and at the same time start a new, unaccomplished one, in other words they are both afterword and preface stories. The interrelation between the epigraph and the epilogue asserts the Christian worldview as conceptual and artistic foundations of “The Brothers Karamazov”.