Госпитальные сцены в «Записках из Мертвого Дома» Достоевского
Hospital Scenes in Dostoevsky’s “Notes from a Dead House”

Summary/Abstract: Dostoevsky conceived “Notes from a Dead House” as a memoir, but the concept was transformed, leading to a change in the chronology and circumstances of the author’s biography. The writer not only described, but also composed his life, placed it in the context of world history. Hospital scenes are important in the structure of “Notes.” Dostoevsky gave an almost professional description of physical illnesses and their treatment. He passes competent judgement on hospital medicine, is fluent in the medical thesaurus, and uses medical Latin. His descriptions are accompanied by judgments and stories about crimes and corporal punishment of prisoners, about executioners and executioners. He believes that medicine in Russia is hostile and does not correspond to the spirit of the people, their habits. The author’s descriptions are factual. They recreate an empirical reality that receives metaphysical interpretation. The means of transforming the empirical into the sacred is Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which influenced the concept of hell, the poetics and structure of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from a Dead House.” Dante saw hell, purgatory, paradise; his visions became the subject of poetry. Dostoevsky lived in hell, in a “Dead House,” this is his personal experience. There are two narrators in the “Notes”: the author’s alter ego and the fictional Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a kind of literary mask of the author. They have different roles, which are often difficult to distinguish. The hero’s name and patronymic are most often heard in conversations with other characters: he asks questions, and they tell him about themselves. It is not the author who asks tactless questions to the heroes — Alexander Petrovich, a knowledgeable prisoner of the “Dead House,” does it for him. He is Dostoevsky’s Virgil. Alexander Petrovich has no future, his hellish toils without purgatory and paradise continued in the “hellish life on the outside.” Not purgatory, but Easter is the act of transformation of the author, who has risen from the dead, found freedom, a new life and a future.

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