Dostoevskij in Focus

This book is the result of the long-standing and fruitful cooperation between the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Moscow. It describes the innovative linguistic approaches developed at the Russian Language Institute (part of the RAS) in the course of work on the Dostoevsky Dictionary. The general issues and methods raised are also of interest to literary scholars. This type of linguistic approach to literary text analysis has opened up new avenues in the research on Dostoevsky, including those of not only purely linguistic concern. The volume comprises five essays. Together they have a common objective, namely to establish a basis for a lexicographic presentation of the multiple features of a literary text. In order, the individual essays, in Russian with German translations, deal with the following issues: (1) the establishing principles of the Dostoevsky Dictionary, which is envisioned not as a single dictionary, but as a series of specific dictionaries that are interrelated; (2) the criteria for recognizing an idiom, especially author-idioms; (3) the characteristics of idiom usage in Dostoevsky; (4) the phraseology of Pushkin’s prose as a basis of contrast with that of Dostoevsky; (5) the structure of the Basic Dictionary of Dostoevsky’s language. The book contains complete indices in both German and Russian.