Неслучайное семейство: родство персонажей Т. Толстой и Ф. Достоевского

This paper explores metaphorical and metonymical textual parallels between Tat'iana Tolstaia's short story ‘A Poet and a Muse’ and Fedor Dostoevskii's novella ‘Notes from Underground’. Tolstaia's characters, events, and tropes reuse and reassemble Dostoevskii's images. Psychoanalytic textual analysis explains these connections as censored text encoded in metaphors and metonymies. The idea of censorship, taken broadly as censorship of life on the basis of literary standards, is presented as the unifying theme of the two texts. The spiritual “underground” of Dostoevskii's character and the “underground” artistic world of Tolstaia's story are shown to be the reverse sides of the same phenomenon of literary censorship.