Истраживање истраженог: како (да) пишемо о Достојевском?
STUDYING OF THE STUDIED: HOW DO/SHOULD WE WRITE ABOUT DOSTOEVSKY?

Summary/Abstract: In the first part of this paper Dostoevsky is taken as an example of world classic whose litetary work has been object of numerous interpretations in the past. How to deal with such an enormous quantity of text? In contemporary studies we are all forced to make a choice among representative critical references adapted to the subject of our interest, putting accent either on the most prominent either on the most recent ones, preferably on both. In theory, it is also possible to neglect all precursors and start from tabula rasa, like Milica Nikolić did in her close reading of the story A Gentle Creature, with accuracy but without much scientific legitimacy. The main part of the paper considers criticaly one recent serbian edition of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Its editor and publisher Zoran Živković named this commented translation a „critical edition“, admitting however his own incompetence in Russian language and demonstrating almost the equal one in matters of Dostoevsky’s work on the whole as well as of a relevant critical literature. His primary ambition was to offer a „completely new reading“ based on the controversial idea that „Demons are not a book about atheism, nihilism and immoralism“, like it’s been usually observed, but above all a novel of love about the „sinisterness of the male beauty“. Contrary to this example of a rather popular then scientific approach, in the final part we rapport a case of one student’s paper concerning A Gentle Creature, where heroine’s tragical destiny was reasonably compared to that of Gretchen’s in Goethe’s Faust. After describing our own effort to find a similar idea in many interpretations, we were eventually pleased to recognize its presumable originality, concluding that studying of classics remains a collective discipline so that literary historian should carefully listen other’s voices before speaking up with his own.

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