The Literary Work as a Semantic Amplifier

This article investigates the hermeneutic position of one text in relation to another one. More precisely, it is the case when one of the texts clarifies the meaning of another, amplifies the emphases of the other text, raises it to a higher power. A literary work with such explanatory intention is designated in the article with the term “semantic amplifier”. Its action is demonstrated by an analysis of two literary works of Dostoevsky: the novel “The Idiot” and the long short story “The Meek One”. The term “dissipative motif network” is introduced in order to designate a network of motifs, whose links stand significantly wide apart and refer to different narrative situations. The connections among the variants of the motifs are not obvious or graphic; they are so to speak dotted, implicit and require deciphering. In “The Idiot” the links of the motif network are such as marking oneself with a sign of the cross in front of an icon, deadly paleness, jumping, and blood. However, those are also the links of the motif chain that constitutes the suicide of the character in “The Meek One”. Nevertheless, when a reader goes through the lens of “The Idiot”, the linkage among these motifs in the long short story seems to be accelerated. What is separated in time and is indirectly connected, it becomes tightened and assembled. The dissipative motif network so to speak gathers up into one indivisible gesture in which this cause and effect merge together into one single trajectory of the jump, the end of which is the death of the character. It is as if what happens in “The Meek One” is latently set in advance in “The Idiot”. A jump from the stairs and a leaping from the roof are variants of the very important for Dostoevsky motif “threshold situation”, which is crossing the threshold in a literal and in a figurative sense; an act which marks a turning point in a plot when decisions are taken, characters go through a crisis and cross the border of incompatible events. When “The Meek One” is read in the sense of framework of “The Idiot”, the story has the function of a semantic amplifier: the jump from a low height turns into a jump from a great height; the almost unconscious ritual of bowing in front of the icon turns into jumping with an icon held in both hands, the deadly paleness understood figuratively turns into the real paleness of a dead body. Thus, in the process that is aimed at creating its artistic conception, a literary work enters into the depths of another literary work, deciphers its innermost messages, enunciates and articulates them with its own voice.