Jostein Børtnes Dostoevsky's Idiot or the Poetics of Emptiness1 ...

In the last sentence, Dostoevsky is thinking of the student Danilov, accused of
having murdered a Moscow pawnbroker and his maidservant, whose trial coincided
with the publication of Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky 1985:498 n. 18).
Crime and Punishment is the first of Dostoevsky’s novels in which his artistic
purpose of finding «man in man» by «undiminished realism» has been developed into
a coherent poetic system. The basic device of this system consists in the juxtaposition
of the narrative with a text of a higher order: Raskolnikov’s story is brought together
with the New Testament story about the raising of Lazarus in a way that transforms
Dostoevsky’s hero into a new Lazarus, a representation of the biblical prototype or
Urbild, which is Christ himself, whose death and resurrection were prefigured in
Lazarus, according to Orthodox tradition.
In literary criticism this device is referred to as figural interpretation, a term
introduced by Erich Auerbach in his book, Mimesis (1946). In theology it is called
biblical typology.
In broader terms, Dostoevsky’s poetic system in Crime and Punishment is a kind
of symbolism in the sense that the content of the Raskolnikov story acquires an
additional meaning as the expression level for a content of a higher, sacred order,
which in its turn serves as a symbol of the Urbild, or generative model of Christ.
A symbol in this sense «always has something archaic about it», and every culture
«needs a body of texts which serves the function of archaism», according to Jury
Lotman (1990:103). Symbols like the one activated by Dostoevskij in Crime and
Punishment belong to our Christian culture’s «nucleus of symbols». They are archaic
and go back to pre-literate times, «when certain signs functioned as condensed
mnemonic programmes for texts and stories preserved in the community's oral
memory»:
Symbols have preserved this ability to store up extremely long and important
texts in condensed form. But even more interesting is another feature, also an
archaic one: a symbol, being a finalized text, does not have to be included in a
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