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The North American Dostoevsky Society is delighted to announce that the 2026 Deborah A. Martinsen Conference Travel Award goes to Mykyta Tyshchenko.
Mykyta Tyshchenko is a scholar of contemporary Ukrainian culture and Russian literature in adaptation. A native of Dzhankoy in northern Crimea, raised in Zaporizhzhia, he studied English and the History of Western Literature at Kyiv National Linguistic University. While in college, he worked as a freelance guide and language instructor—a vocation he has not given up since. He defended his dissertation on women’s authorship in Ukrainian literature, dramaturgy, and film at The Ohio State University’s Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures in August 2026. Over the years, he has taught Russian at Pomona College, the University of Pittsburgh’s STARTALK program, and Ohio State, where he taught both Russian and Ukrainian. He currently serves as Vice President of Dobro Slovo National Honors Society.
At the 2026 ASEEES convention in Chicago, he will present “Hurt People: Reexamining Violence in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.”
Abstract: This paper argues that the suffering of Nastasya Filippovna and Parfyon Rogozhin is rendered in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1869 novel The Idiot with the same precision as Prince Myshkin’s epilepsy, and that this has gone largely unrecognized because, unlike Myshkin’s illness, their suffering is never named in the text. The study consists of three parts. The first draws on the medical humanities to examine Dostoevsky’s construction of Myshkin’s epilepsy, arguing that decades of scholarship confirm his attention to the physical, psychological, and neurological dimensions of suffering, which establishes a premise that extends to the novel’s other protagonists. The second part turns to four cinematic adaptations—Akira Kurosawa’s Hakuchi (1951), Ivan Pyryev’s The Idiot (1958), Andrzej Wajda’s Nastazja (1994), and Rainer Sarnet’s Idioot (2011)—to make visible what the novel leaves unnamed: Nastasya Filippovna’s trauma, and the central place it occupies in the story. Drawing on Lioudmila Fedorova’s concept of ‘areas of unresolved conflicts,’ the paper argues that the religious and mystical meanings Dostoevsky inscribed into epilepsy recede across these adaptations not arbitrarily, but because the historical and cultural contexts of their making speak urgently to the experience of abuse and objectification. The third part offers to reexamine Parfyon Rogozhin through a close reading of the novel, suggesting that he be understood not as an innately cruel character but as a product of an abusive childhood. This reexamination was made possible by the film analyses that produced a critical distance from the Myshkin-versus-Rogozhin framework that has long informed readings of the novel. Situating the argument within Dostoevsky’s broader preoccupation with violence against children in his works, the paper ultimately proposes to read The Idiot not only as a meditation on salvation and moral purity but as one of the author’s explorations of child abuse and its traumatic afterlives.
The paper is scheduled for 1:30 pm (CST) on the panel “Medical Humanities and Aesthetics II: Bodies and Minds That Map: Trauma, Disability, and Art in Slavic Cultures.”
Congratulations to Mykyta Tyshchenko!