« L’infinité en petitesse » Pascal et Dostoïevski
"Infinity in smallness" Pascal and Dostoevsky

Summary/Abstract: Dostoevsky was familiar with the oeuvre of Blaise Pascal. It is provable that he read the book Pensées. One of the central concepts of this book (“les extrémités se touchent”) is cited in the novel The Idiot. In my essay, I make an attempt to reconstruct the original context of the citation. I sketch two possible interpretative practices of the cited anthropological concept: the cognitive and the heuristic one (“le coeur a son ordre, l’esprit a le sien”). There is a special type of text which corresponds to each of them. In The Idiot, the cognitive strategy is risen up to an ideological level by the statements of the main character, meanwhile the heuristic text production is realized by the narrative metaphors of the confession discourse. In my essay, I put a special emphasis on the problem of fragment and its functioning in the structure of prose language

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