Alpatova Tat’yana Aleksandrovna – Doctor in Philology, Associate Professor; Professor of the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, State University of Education, Moscow
The subject of the article is the cultural, historical, literary and psychological foundations of the phenomenon of “female tyranny” in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky of the late 1850s – early 1860s, primarily in the story The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants. The basis of this phenomenon for the writer was the ambivalent dependence of humiliation and the desire to humiliate – key both in the image of Foma Opiskin and the female characters of the story – the General’s wife and Anfisa Petrovna Obnoskina. These two figures implement the main poles of the binary model of “female tyranny” in Dostoevsky – the power of authority of the “female ruler” and the power of erotic attraction of the “female lover”. Historical-genetic, comparative-typological, structural-semiotic methodologies allow us to analyze these images by turning to their basic foundation – rococo literature, travestied by Dostoevsky, in whose world the “ultimate”, existential result of the rocaille cultural idea of instability and fragility of being is revealed – the collapse of culture and the release of archaic numinous energies into human life, in the case of “female tyranny” conditioned by the disclosure of the archetype of the Great Mother.
F.M. Dostoevsky; The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants; “female tyranny”; rococo literature; literary influences; cultural-historical school; psychologism; archetype of the Great Mother