Books as texts and objects in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works

The article investigates the issue of books functioning in Dostoevsky’s works not only as texts analyzed alongside the writer’s own works, but as physical objects that play roles apparently unconnected with their contexts. The purpose of the research is to use the ambivalent image of books as both objects and texts to demonstrate that all elements in Dostoevsky’s poetics, including marginal ones, stem from the fundamental principles of his poetics. The research is novel in that it focuses on a little-investigated issue of books functioning as physical objects independent of their contents playing roles that appear incompatible with their traditional purpose serving as vessels or even as covers for other objects. This research optics refocuses attention on people connected with books, and our findings show that the same elements of a text can play different roles, and exploring even a single element in Dostoevsky’s works reveals key elements in major aspects of Dostoevsky’s poetics, such as his epistemology, anthropology and theology, and his ideas of the false (self-deification) and true (kenotic self-emptying) goals of human existence.