Dostoevsky's Iconography Code especially in <SistineMadonna> and <Crime and Punishment>

Ju-Kwan Cho

doi:10.21049/ccs.2008.12.1.299

It could be said about the communication of art and literature that they are an intertextual dialogue to a broader understanding of the human world. Dostoevsky, who regarded picture as visual literature, praised Raffaello's Painting, <Sistine Madonna> as the "greatest work of art in human history" and used it as a subject matter of his literary works. The young girls that usually appear in his novels are imitations or variations of Madonna (the Virgin Mary). The purpose of this essay is how the novelist uses his artistic imagination code to look into the union of holiness and worldliness. Dostoevsky, like Andrei Rublyov, developed his own method in enjoying art. He is an artist who look at the human world in the wanton Zeus' cunning view enjoying fully the freedom of imagination. He could be called as the greatest imaginative artist in the world. Dostoevsky granted a special meaning to Raffaello's <Sistine Madonna>. In Raffaello's religious painting, the yet young Virgin Mary who has a child in her arms reminds of Sonya's figure who also has Raskolnikov in her arms. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov throws himself on Sonya and confesses his crime. Here, Sonya somehow plays the role of the confession priest. She was deeply distressed from this but then tells him to go to the broad way to kiss the site where he has defiled and to confess all his sins. Sonya resembles Virgin Mary because of her understand of human's agony, and Raskolnikov resembles the baby who admits of his sin to the Virgin Mary. The encounter of literary text and artistic text is the communication of icon and language signs. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov confesses his crime to the prostitute Sonya and Svidrigaylov finding the images of Virgin Mary are all only possible with the author's liberal cannibalistic imagination. In Dostoevsky's work, prostitute girls appear to the protagonists as saviors because they are Virgin Mary's impersonation. Of course, in the Christian's viewpoint, associating a young girl and a virgin statue, and paring her with a lascivious man might be blasphemy or defilement of the sacred object. Dostoevsky is associating the young girl that was sold from the Virgin Mary, but that blasphemy of the Holy Mother does not necessarily mean the varnish of the Holy Mother's essence. In Dostoevsky's creative world, the Holy Mother is disguised as a wretched young prostitute girl, but the Holy Mother is portraying the figure of a savior who saves mankind from suffering and indigence. This point is the reason why Sonya had been portrayed as the savior in Crime and Punishment. Originally, the highest value of the Orthodox faith is holiness. Virtue is the greatest moral which preserves the Russian mind in the Russian secular world. If Dostoevsky was a drawing artist, he would have drawn religious paintings portraying young girls as prostitutes like Raffaello, who used his girl friend as a model to draw the Virgin Mary. The encounter of literature and art is an open communication that broadens the area of human comprehension.

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