The subject of reflection in the article was the author's non-obvious ideological position, the extraordinary genre structure of the heroic sphere, the strong position of the title of the work and some points of context. Dostoevsky's novel “The Idiot” is considered as a kind of artistic rebus, the solution of which leads to an understanding of the author's logic. A retrospective meta-novel-thematic background of F.M. Dostoevsky's first novel
problems is given. The total rationality inherent in the image of an adult Raskolnikov (as opposed to his spontaneous childish protest against killing a horse) in conjunction with the intention to commit a crime are compared with the contemplative-passive mode of existence of Prince Myshkin. The juxtaposition of the Author-Creator and the main character in the perspective of the aesthetics of the naive is characterized. The issue of Christian concepts has been transferred from the theological plane to the field of artistic analysis. Special attention is paid to the relativity of ideas about murder as a social phenomenon in the refraction of F.M. Dostoevsky's work. The evolution of the theme of violent death in the analyzed novels from a naive standpoint appears to be the result of hypertrophied rationality, an unnatural phenomenon alien to the true nature of man, which is usually associated with the soul. An occasional topos in the writer's work, “realism in the highest sense” from the perspective
of naivism provides an opportunity for a new interpretation of the nonlinear development of the writer's artistic thought.
For citation: Ivanov E.E. The naivism of violent death in F.M. Dostoevsky's novel “The Idiot”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 1, pp. 5—11.