This thesis examines imagery of the subconscious throughout the works of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii and how it can be used to analyse the psychology of his characters and the author himself. While studies exist on the role of, for example, dreams in Dostoevskii’s works, this thesis aims to comprehensively examine the author’s experience and use of subconscious phenomena as a whole, and their most important role in his texts: their effect on the characters who experience them. In each chapter, one form of this imagery in Dostoevskii’s works is explained and analysed with respect to individual characters or themes, and then Dostoevskii’s own experiences of the relevant subconscious phenomenon are explored. Chapter 1 looks at imagery arising through characters’ daydreams, while the author’s recurrent theme of childhood memories is also analysed as a type of nostalgic daydream. Chapter 2 examines the ‘greyer’ area of dreamlike reality, which in itself operates at two poles: confusion between dream and reality; and reality so intense as to appear unreal. The role of the ‘unreal’ city of St Petersburg is also analysed, as well as Dostoevskii’s narrative mode of ‘fantastic realism’. Chapter 3 looks at characters’ hallucinations, while Chapter 4 focuses on the character of Goliadkin in Двойник and his decline into split personality. Chapter 5 analyses the imagery of dreams, be they of anxiety and warning, of catharsis and peripeteia, or those featuring Dostoevskii’s recurring motif of the ‘Golden Age’ of mankind. The final chapter differs slightly in form by focusing on the overarching condition of epilepsy. Analysis of the author’s principal epileptic character, Prince Myshkin in Идиот, reveals the ‘deepest’ point of subconscious imagery, the ecstatic aura. Upon examining the condition’s recorded effects on Dostoevskii, epilepsy is ultimately discerned as the origin of many of the author’s experiences of subconscious phenomena and, in turn, the imagery of the subconscious used in his works. Moreover, experiences of subconscious phenomena are found to be a vital source of literary inspiration and motivation for Dostoevskii; so the correlating imagery of the subconscious is thus able to reveal fictional characters’ deepest drives and can be used as a means to glean vital, otherwise unseen, insights into their psychology.

Despite the volume of research into fairytales, gender and ideology in media studies, the specific subject of animated adaptations of national fairytales and their role in constructing gender identities remains a blind spot at least in relation to non-Western and non-Hollywood animation. This study addresses the gap by analysing animated adaptations of Russian national fairytales in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema and television. It does so as a tool through which to approach the gender politics of the dominant ideologies in national cinema and also, though to a lesser extent, in television. One of the key perspectives this research adopts concerns the reorganization of the myths of femininity, as stored in ‘national memory’ and transferred through the material of national fairytales produced during a century-long period. By providing a detailed critical treatment of animated adaptations of Russian magic fairytales, this research examines the interaction between the cinematic versions of the national fairytales and the representation of female characters on screen. It draws on a range of feminist theoretical approaches on media representation. By performing a systematic study of the under-researched field, through a combination of qualitative and empirical analysis, the work demonstrates how totalitarian regimes and new democratic societies implicitly control gender constructions in similar ways, and specifically through the animated versions of national fairytale adaptations. The research identifies how the constructions of femininity are manipulated through the reshaping of the national past coded in the ancient folkloric narratives. The findings of the study reveal the principles on which the implicit patriarchal gender politics is based. These principles include the conservative choice of fairytale material adapted to the screen, the reactionary increase of production of animated fairytales targeted against liberalisation, the exclusion and reconstruction of strong matriarchal fairytale female characters, stereotypical representation of selected female characters, and normalisation of domestic violence. In so doing the study identifies a weakness in the existing scholarly discourse on ideology, which traditionally has claimed that Soviet animation was non-violent. Further, the study establishes the constructions of national memory and female identity as a part of the dominant cinematic discourses.

This history of Dostoevsky’s reception in France draws from critical responses, translation analysis, and the comparative analysis of adaptations as well as intertextual dialogues between fictional, critical and philosophical texts. It begins from the earliest translations and critical accounts of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s seminal moralist reading. It then traces modernist responses and adaptations from the turn of the century to the twenties. Existential readings and re-translations dating from the arrival of émigré critics and religious philosophers in the wake of the Russian Revolution are examined, assessing the contribution of these émigré readings to emerging existential readings and movements in France. Finally, French existentialist fiction is analysed in terms of its intertextual dialogue with Dostoevsky’s work and with speculative and critical writings of French existentialist thinkers on and around the philosophical reflections expressed in Dostoevsky’s fiction. By following specifically the existential and existentialist branches of Dostoevsky’s French reception, an overlooked aspect of the history of French, Russian and European existentialisms comes to the fore, reframed within a pivotal period in the history of European intercultural exchange, and of transmodal literary and philosophical discourse.