THE INEXPRESSIBLE IN THE WORKS OF DANTE, GOETHE AND DOSTOEVSKY

The article looks at the 'eternal' problem of the inexpressible in the cultural and historic forms and motives it took in the works of Dante, Goethe and Dostoevsky. We view the inexpressible as a product of subject-object type of relations. In the case of Dante, the issue of the 'inexpressible' stemmed from strict subordination of subject-object relations in the Middle Ages, where the object was universal and sacred (with God as its highest form) and the subject was something 'under' (cf. the meaning of Latin prefix 'sub'), something incomplete and not self-sufficient, with their cognitive capacity limited. The integrity of the world according to Goethe is achieved through the dynamic unity of its constituent parts rather than through their vertical hierarchy. In this unity, the external (objective) mingles with the internal (subjective) and vice versa. In the vision of earthly paradise in Dostoevsky's The Dream of Ridiculous Man the visual dominant is set up by the protagonists's cosmic guide: “To see everything...” Dostoevsky adds a new twist to the issue of the inexpressible, which takes the shape of a certain metalanguage the paradise dwellers use to communicate. The issue of the inexpressible has remained urgent since the days of Dostoevsky, as indeed it had been long before Dante. Multifaceted as the problem may be, it can be defined as a translation issue, if we view translation itself as a cultural rather than simply a linguistic phenomenon. Analysed this way, translation includes: 1) the translation of creative process into its outcomes; 2) translating the visual into the verbal; etc.