Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “A Little Hero” as an Initiatory Text

Abstract

The article analyses Dostoevsky’s short story “A Little Hero”, the only literary work written during the author’s imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The article shows how the essence of this work is to be an initiatory text, describing the hero’s step-by-step journey to gain his true spiritual nature. The main character of the story starts his path as a child for whom there is no place, with whom anyone can play as if he was a doll, and eventually becomes the one that is recognized as a knight who gained is place in the world, the one who has the power to revive the heart of the main female character, m-me M., and what is more important, the one who as a result of all his deeds has seen into his own true nature. The article demonstrates that through architectonics and carefully chosen details and images Dostoevsky relates his story to several European texts where the path to acquiring man’s spiritual nature is told symbolically, i.e. texts, that are in essence initiatory: Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Tasso’s poem Jerusalem Delivered. The article also identifies several semantic and symbolic coincidences with Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane Love.