Notes on Dostoevsky’s Poetics Possibilities of reading Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured from Hoffmann’s point of view

Abstract

The Insulted and Injured is usually considered to be one of Dostoevsky’s  less popular works,  as an immature novel partly based on documentary manuscript but also showing ars poetical meanings in many ways. However looking from a scientific point, it is considered to be a unique piece of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre displaying the paradigm shift of his literary attitude by the early 1960s.

In this novel Dostoevsky openly turns away from his own romantic past of the forties and paints a ruthless caricature of all manifestations of the “Schilleresque Idealism”. That is why it is essential to admit that in this procedure his greatest help was still E. T. A. Hoffmann, aside from the admittedly complex literary coding. E. T. A. Hoffmann, who had been admired by Dostoevsky since he was a teenager, had text composition techniques which reflected sceptical-ironic relationship with the early German Romanticism’s aesthetic-philosophical ideas. The present study specifically examines the intertextual meanings connected to him by investigating the following questions: how Hoffmann-texts generate different sujets and how much the romantic patterns live on or being modified by Dostoevsky.