Impact of F. M. Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot” upon the F. Mauriac’s novella “The Lamb”: the problem of an atoning sacrifice

Abstract

The subject of this research is the F. Mauriac’s novella “The Lamb” viewed from the perspective of impact of Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” upon it. The goal is to establish and describe the coincidences and similarities between the texts on the level of poetics of the plot and literary details, as well as methods of creating the characters and psychologism, interpreted by Mauriac as conscious borrowings. The author attempts to determine the key points of the religious-philosophical polemics between Dostoevsky and Mauriac. The focus of this research is the central for Mauriac’s novel and just one of the difficult themes in Dostoevsky’s novel question of the atoning sacrifice of a beautiful, “Christ-like” person. The main conclusion consists in the fact that Mauriac structures the protagonist’s storyline leans on the impossibility for Dostoevsky’s heroes to resolve the question on reasonableness of the atoning sacrifice: if “The Idiot” ends with a tragedy and total fiasco of a positive and beautiful character, whose sacrifice became deleterious, the sacrifice of Xavier became salvific and filled with sacred meaning. At the same time, the visible artistic reality and harmoniousness of Mauriac’s creation is possible due to simplification and unification of problematic of the Russian precedent text.