Reality as a Side of the Imaginary in the Works of F.M. Dostoevsky

In many of his works, the great Russian writer and thinker F.M. Dostoevsky depicted the boundary between sleep and reality, reality and hallucination as flexible, which was noted by many researchers of his work. However, most attempts to comprehend this led to the idea that Dostoevsky’s lack of such a boundary was caused by the madness that struck his characters (K.V. Mochulsky, D.R. Khapaeva, I.I. Evlampiev). With this interpretation of the problem, the idea that reality exists in itself is accepted as a starting premise, and a healthy person sees it as it is, and a mad person sees it as it appears in their altered consciousness. Indeed, in this case, there is a gap in the thesis bequeathed to us by Parmenides about the identity of being and thinking about it. Thus, we are talking about an ontological interpretation of the problem. According to N.A. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky was the most important anthropologist ever before and after him. And F.M. Dostoevsky himself wrote that he was ready to spend his whole life dealing with what a person is, because he wanted to be one. This means that the problems posed in his works need an anthropological interpretation, and in this article philosophical and anthropological analysis is used as the main research method. If we approach this problem from a philosophical and anthropological point of view and raise the question of what reality is for a person, then we should conclude that a person does not know what reality itself is if it is not preceded by a sense of reality for him. Accordingly, we can assert that the plasticity of the boundary between reality and hallucination, dream and reality is not caused by human disease. It is not given to him at all to fi nd out what reality looks like in itself, for a person it is a side of the imaginary. Thus, we understand that a person does not live in the world, but in a picture of the world, and no reality in itself exists for them.