The article is dedicated to the analysis of the main concepts in the novel The Idiot aimed at a better understanding of its most enigmatic scenes. The main word of the novel is “new”, both on a plot level and on a deeper, ontological one. The novel vividly demonstrates how the manifestation of the “new” is actually connected with emotions that are very different from the ones we could suppose by default; in fact, it is connected with fear, disgust, a sense of disruption and destruction, radical transition, and unknown. Dostoevsky shows how this kind of human relationship with the “new” is an effective way to enclose man in the narrow prison of earthly life, denying immortality and resurrection; it also encloses man in the narrow prison of social prejudices, denying the possibility for free growth of his humanity. The analysis focuses on the first scene at the Epanchyns’, the story about the soldier Kolpakov (the only thing we know about the father of the prince), and Ippolit’s dream about the non-scorpion and the Newfoundland dog Norma.

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The question about the difference (or the absence of it) between Dostoevsky's early texts and the works composed after the penal labors have been raised repeatedly. The article proposes a possible explanation of it. The hypothesis here presented and exemplified through the analysis of the novel Netochka Nezvanova should be considered mainly as an invitation to discussion, more than the proposal of a final answer to the problem. The article suggests that we should look for the difference between earlier and later works within the level on which Dostoevsky assembles the material as a coherent storyline. While later works show coherency on an external plot level and reach the deep level of the text by connecting different scenes to episodes of the Sacred History; early works are connotated by extremely incoherent plots, which provoked (and provokes nowadays) many complaints about Dostoevsky' authorial skills: in fact, the coherent history takes place within a deeper, being-related perspective, while the incoherent episodes of the outer tale are no more than a manifestation on an existential level of the inner "anagogic" story.

Not much has been said about Dostoevsky and hesychasm, and mainly with the greatest evidence and persuasiveness in the case when direct references to the figures of hesychasm appeared directly in the text of Dostoevsky's novel (“The Brothers Karamazov”). However, hesychasm can be considered as an optimal explanatory structure already for the novel “Crime and Punishment”. In this novel hesychasm is most obviously present, not from the point of view of superficial references or an external plot developing in the “apparent flow of life” (as Dostoevsky designated what happens on the surface of being), but from the point of view of the deepest plot, in which what happens in the novel is connected with “ends and beginnings” (so Dostoevsky called the origins and the results of events that are beyond the obvious, beyond time). The original title of the novel, “The Drunkards”, which later became “Crime and Punishment”, as well as the characteristics of the characters found in “Crime and Punishment” (to be “drunk without wine”, to be mistaken for a drunk in a sober state, to hide behind the illusion of intoxication their pre- and post-criminal state), strictly associate drunkenness with sin and a crime. The direct opposition to this state is sobriety, which the participants of the Hesychast tradition strive to achieve, and the collection of texts of this tradition, “Philokalia”, is called in the translation by Paisii Velichkovsky: “Words and Beginnings of Sacred Sobriety”. The separation of heart and mind, which characterizes the two main criminal characters of the novel, is the main characteristic of the pre-natural state of a person according to hesychasm. Hesychasm also makes it possible to explain why the heroine, who occupies the highest position in the spiritual structure of the novel, is characterized by the words “She will see God”.