The image of femme fatale in Dostoevsky's work through the prism of the structural psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan
Authors:   Siberian State Medical University, Semenyuk Xenia A. , Semenyuk Anton P. ,   Siberian State Medical University
Published: February 2023

The interest of psychoanalysis to Dostoevsky's work is due to the consonance of theoretical and literary discourses in the interpretation of unconscious motives that determine human behavior. The most vivid embodiment of Freud's ideas, which influenced modern philosophy, we find in Jacques Lacan, whose concepts of the subject absorbed in language and pleasure allow us to explicate the construction of femme fatale, which can describe a number of female characters of Dostoevsky. In fact, we can talk about Freud's discovery of a hysterical subject, which will later be described by Lacan no longer as a mental pathology, but as one of the structures of the psyche, along with psychotic and perverse. Removing the veneer of simplifying biologism from Freud's ideas, Lacan gives them a new sound in the light of structural linguistics, which fits them into the mainstream of the linguistic turn of philosophy. The interpretation of a number of female images of Dostoevsky carried out in this article through the prism of the Lacanian categorical apparatus allows, on the one hand, to explicate one of the constructs of his novels, and on the other - to draw parallels between the writer's intuitive insights and theoretical findings of the second half of the XX century. The phenomenon of femme fatale is considered on the material of two female characters of Dostoevsky (NastasiaFilippovna and Grushenka), whose obvious hysterical and narcissistic character traits most fully correspond to the image of femme fatale. In addition, the authors argue that femme fatale is primarily a phenomenon of language, that is, the more people talk about it, the more fatal it becomes in the eyes of others. Femme fatale realizes the enjoyment of speech and the capture of the subject by language. The authors consider the aspect of enjoying speech to be an obligatory structural component of this construction. Femme fatale is one of the faces of a Beautiful lady, who, as Lacan writes, is inaccessible to male desire, so the only pleasures that he can afford are fantasy and the enjoyment of speech. However, when he speaking about a woman, a man puts his subjectivity on the line, since the pleasure of the fullness or the pleasure of Another is outside the field of the imaginary and symbolic, and only in them can the subject exist. The desired meeting according to Lacan ends with madness or death, which Dostoevsky demonstrates to us with virtuosity in the scene after the murder of NastasiaFilippovna by Rogozhin. In his heroines, Dostoevsky, with the flair of a psychoanalyst, fixes the mechanism that triggers the utterance of a symptom and the enjoyment of speechwhich provoke the desire to possess and at the same time do not allow its realization, forcing the male heroes to circle around the object of desire in endless repetition and involving more and more victims in this circle. Signifiers cling to signifiers, finding the axis of rotation in the symbolic phallus - the femme fatale.