The genesis and variations of the image of the medieval knight in Russian literature of the nineteenth century: Breaking the code of chivalry (Russian text, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

This study concentrates on the image of the Medieval Knight (which is viewed as one of the core concepts of Western culture) in Russian literature of the nineteenth century.; For the convenience of this study the author introduces the notion of the morphology of the Knight which is based on the presence of three dimensions (battle, religious, courtly) in the images of the knights in Medieval literature. Due to the lack of either religious or courtly dimensions in the images of the knights in the Russian translations of Western knightly literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Western Code of Chivalry was not properly introduced into original Russian literature of the eighteenth century. With the works of the early Russian romantics as a background, this study focuses on particular works of three Russian literary geniuses of the nineteenth century, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in which the discourse of the Medieval Knight is featured.; This study shows that all three writers tended to transform behavioral models and discourses connected with the image of the Medieval Knight, which they inherited from the early Russian romantics, in order to undermine the Western Code of Chivalry by religious eroticism (Pushkin), alienation of the epic death from the romantic hero (Tolstoy), awakening of an individual conscience inside the artificial knightly world (Dostoevsky).; The author of this study suggests that the breaking of the Western Code of Chivalry in the works of the above-mentioned writers is somewhat connected with the unaccomplished morphology of the Medieval Knight in Russian Literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.