Taking off the masks: Dostoevsky sketches life into fiction

Abstract

Starting from the relationship reality-fiction and of theories about autobiography and autofiction developed by Phillippe Lejeune and Phillippe Gasparini, the present study aims to expose the different levels of biographical exploitation in two works published by Dostoevsky in approximately the same period, Notes from the House of the Dead (1860-1862) and The Gambler (1866), in which the autobiographical material melts into the fiction in different ways. Notes combines elements of autobiography and autofiction, while The Gambler is an example of a fictional text with a powerful autobiographical substrate. In both cases, the strategies used by Dostoevsky to fictionalize his own life aim to distort the real elements of the author’s life, in different doses. Dostoevsky constructs for himself a complex fictive identity from a psychological point of view in order to describe his own experiences (the trauma of prison and his obsession with gambling), in a process to remodel the self.