THE WORD FANTAZIYA ‘FANTASY’ IN THE LITERARY WORKS BY F. M. DOSTOEVSKY

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the use of the word fantaziya ‘fantasy’ in the texts of the literary works by F. M. Dostoevsky. At the beginning, a short historical background is given about the appearance of the word fantaziya ‘fantasy’ in the 18th century Russian language in comparison with the word deistvitel’nost’ ‘reality’. It is noted that initially the word fantaziya was a poetic word, as can be judged from the data of the Russian National Corpus. The article also presents, in comparison with the words deistvitel’nost ‘reality’ and voobrazheniye ‘imagination’, quantitative characteristics of the use of the word fantaziya by some writers — Dostoevsky’s contemporaries. These data indicate that in the Russian literature of the 19th century it was Dostoevsky who used this word more often than others when addressing the topic of fantasy and its role in human life. A comparison of the number of uses of the word fantaziya with Leo Tolstoy is indicative: on corpora containing more than 1 million word uses, the diff erence in the number of occurrences of the word fantaziya is very clear: 113 uses in Dostoevsky and only 7 — in L. Tolstoy.
Dostoevsky referred to the word fantaziya throughout his entire work. Using the example of the contexts of three periods of the writer’s work, the article shows how he reveals the various aspects of the impact of fantasy on a person.