Realism of the Breakthrough. The Internaltext in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Prose Cover Image

Realizm przełomu. Tekst wewnętrzny w prozie Fiodora Dostojewskiego
Realism of the Breakthrough. The Internaltext in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Prose

Author(s): Przemysław Pietrzak
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Fyodor Dostoyevsky; "internal text"; relationship between literature and reality; Cervantes; "Don Quixote";

Summary/Abstract: The author of the paper analyses the specific construction of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s prose, which he calls the “internal text”. He assumes that it is an additional structure of signs placed into a literary text that breaks the text-reality tension (this is what makes it different from a common case of “story within a story” and a quotation). Thus Dostoyevsky’s writings transcends not only the borders of broadly understood realism, but also touches the relationship between literature and reality in total. At the same time, the author recalls the older, “pre-Balzacian” type of novel, the sources of which are found in Cervantes’s “Don Quixote". This model questions the narrator’s credibility and obviousness of the world presented. Pietrzak proves that in Dostoyevsky’s text, both the internal text and the world presented are in a dialectic tension and continuously shape one another.

  • Issue Year: 2006
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 127-153
  • Page Count: 27
  • Language: Polish