Fyodor Karamazov as the philosopher of old age: contexts of understanding

The author of the article makes an attempt at restoring the distant and close contexts, the idea-content range of which brings certain adjustments to the existing scientific views on the philosophy of old age, declared by Fyodor Karamazov. The linear and paradigmatic context of Fyodor Karamazov’s gerontological reflection is represented mainly by classical philosophical (Cicero’s treatise “Cato the Elder [or] on the old age”, pamphlet by Erasmus of Rotterdam “Praise of Stupidity”), literary, and artistic (Lomonosov’s and Lvov-Derzhavin’s poetic versions of the Anacreon myth), as well as by fictional (the anonymous story “Anacreon, or the Power of Love” (M., 1796) and translated story “The Old Man” from the cycle “The Picture of stupidity of this century, or of Passion at different age” (M., 1783)) sources, ensuring the relevant understanding of the vital strategy at the senile age developed on “the stone of voluptuousness” by Dostoevsky’s personage. The content-matter of the axiomatic texts actualized in the novel was intentionally subjected by the writer to frontal deformation and distortion, thereby activating the satirical potential of “negative intertextuality” as a “minus-device” (the term by Yu. M. Lotman). Its usage enabled demonstration of axiological emptiness of Fyodor Karamazov’s gerontophile strategy, marking to the point the fundamental “extra-code” character of his personal gerontosophy, equal to the rejection of the whole range of sacramental cultural models of men’s senile behavior. Dostoevsky’s estimation of Karamazov as a philosopher of old age, polemically pointed against the sentimentalist versions of the “Anacreontic myth,” actually conveyed Lomonosov’s intellectual emotion, who ironically called Anacreon “the great philosópher”. Fyodor Karamazov’s gerontological reflection, the conceptual design and effect of which in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” was achieved by regular interruptions of spontaneous, parallel multi-component associations, is viewed as a complex implementation on the personage’s level of the polyphonic principle of artistic thinking of F. M. Dostoevsky, who created a novel of a new type.