Metarhetorics of F. Dostoevsky

The return of contemporary philology to the ideas and categories of rhetoric, in the context of current communication theory and humanities, means that it is essential to have a more through analysis of writers' rhetorical techniques. On this background, the works of Dostoevsky are of particular interest. His multi-strata word has become an instrument for understanding the human speech and for analyzing a person?s mentality. In turn this requires the application of pragmatic methods of analysis of Dostoe vsky's characters' speech and the study of forms of metalinguistic reflection on artistic techniques, which can be found most clearly in paradoxes of speech, in comic devices and in the ways of 're-encoding' of rhetorical forms. The proposed research top ic is the metarhetoric. The thesis aims to analyze the origins, structures, devices and aesthetic functions of rhetorics in Dostoevsky's works; to show how eloquence and rhetorics, including their conventional and parody forms, function as constructive el ements of Dostoevsky's texts, forming both an important subject of representation and its artistic method. The purpose of the project is to demonstrate, how a particular word or a single phrase, passing through the devices of rhetorical reflection, can a ffect the whole of the text, change its meaning and the way it is perceived. How Dostoevsky plays with rhetoric, tries to escape from it and creates his own. The basic research subject is the speech of characters (and the narrator's speech, as far as he i s presented as a certain person and never fits the author in fiction text) in Dostoevsky's literature. The proposed project is a part of my PhD research. Within the three-month stay in Bergen I plan to focus on writing and reading under the supervision o f Prof. Lunde, to attend lectures and seminars at the department of Arts at the University of Bergen, and organize a seminar to present my work and discuss it with the Norwegian colleagues.