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Chaos, Apocalypse, The Laws of Nature: Autonomy and “Unity” in Dostoevskii’s Idiot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gary Rosenshield
Gary Rosenshield*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

Addressing what he sees as serious disjunctures in characterization and narrative technique, Joseph Frank has called Idiot “the most disorganized,” of Fedor Dostoevskii’s major works. The first part of the novel so differs from the last three parts, Frank holds, that it may “best be read as an independent novella.” Although, undoubtedly, many subtle structural, thematic, and rhetorical elements tie the novel together, Idiot does seem at times to generate as much centrifugal as centripetal force. Tackling this issue head on, Robin Feuer Miller, with judicious use of reader-response theory, succeeds in imposing some order on the narrational disjunctures of the text, setting up a hierarchy of narrators and narrative personae. More problematic, however, is the question of point of view in the larger sense. In the Bakhtinian sense, point of view manifests itself in the relation between the different narrators of the novel as the autonomous voices of the characters and the narrator enter into an unfinished dialogue. The broader use of the term concerns the novel’s worldviews, or master plots, which variously govern and structure the presentation of character, story, and metaphor.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 879 - 889
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

1. Frank, Joseph, “A Reading of The Idiot ,” Southern Review 5, no. 2 (1969): 314.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 313. In a letter of 23 April 1871 to one of his best friends and most perceptive critics, Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevskii frankly confessed the formal problems he experienced with Idiot:

Но вот что скажу о Вашем последнем суждении о моем романе: во-1-х, Вы слишком высоко меня поставили за то, что нашли хорошим в романе, и 2) Вы ужасно метко указали главный недостаток. Да, я страдал этим и страдаю; я совершенно не умею, до сих пор (не научился), совладать с моими средствами. Множество отдельных романов и повестей разом втискиваются у меня в один, так что ни меры, ни Гармонии. Всё это изумительно верно сказано Вами, и как я страдал от этого сам уже многие Годы, ибо сам сознал это. Но есть и того хуже: я, не спросясь со средствами своими и увлекаясь поэтическим порывом, берусь выразить художественную идею не по силам.

Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobrante sochinenii, ed. Bazanov, V. G. et al., 30 vols. (Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1972-): 29.1:208 Google Scholar (Hereafter PSS.)

3. Miller, Robin Feuer, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies devoted specifically to the narrative structure of Idiot, see Zun-delovich, la. O., “Osobennosti povestvovaniia v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo Idiot, “ Trudy Uzbekskogo gos. un-ta: Novaia seriia 93 (1958): 3-44 Google Scholar; Etov, V. I., “Manera ‘povestvovaniia’ v romane Dostoevskogo Idiot ,” Vestnik moskovskogo un-ta 21, no. 1 (1966): 70–76 Google Scholar; Farakos, Mary, “The Narrator in The Idiot ,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 11 (1975): 123–132 Google Scholar; Kovacs, Arpad, “Sootnoshenie prostranstvennovremennoj i povest-vovatel’noj struktur v romane Idiot Dostoevskogo, F. M.,” Slavica 15 (1977): 37–53 Google Scholar; Kovacs, Arpad, “K voprosu ob”ektivnoi manere F.M. Dostoevskogo v romane Idiot ,” Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestinensis: Sectio Philologica Moderna 5 (1974): 89–100 Google Scholar; Kovacs, Arpad, “Povestvovatel’naia kompetentsiia geroia i rasskazchika v romanakh Dostoevskogo,” Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestinensis: Sectio Philologica Moderna 11 (1980): 55–70 Google Scholar; Pascal, Roy, “Dostoevsky and the Flux of Experience: The Idiot ,” The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Miller, , Author, Narrator and Reader . Mikhail Bakhtin’s notes on the narration of Idiot —in his Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 4th ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979)Google Scholar—are, as they are for all his analyses of Dostoevskii’s later novels, rather sketchy.

4. I am using the word plot here much as it is used by Kermode, Frank in his The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

5. I have chosen not to call these worldviews ideologies. Although contextually, any complex of simultaneously held ideas might constitute an ideology and Apocalypse certainly would qualify as a religious ideology, the ideas of chaos and the laws of nature, as I present them here, have little to recommend themselves as ideologies, “those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving, and believing which,” according to Eagleton, Terry, “have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power” (Literary Theory: An Introduction [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 15)Google Scholar.

6. See Jones, Malcolm, Dostoevsky: The Novel of Discord (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), 114–128 Google Scholar.

7. Fedor Dostoevskii, Idiot, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 8:5.

8. For a discussion of the connections of the Rogozhins with the raskol’niki, see Peace, Richard, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 85–88 Google Scholar.

9. For the most complete, although somewhat controversial, treatment of the physiological aspect of Dostoevskii’s epilepsy and Dostoevskii’s own view of his disease, see Rice, James L., Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985)Google Scholar. I have chosen the epileptic aura as a basis of comparison because, in Dostoevskii’s world, the liminal is not only privileged, it is at the very center of the novel’s metaphysics. For a discussion of the centrality of the liminal in Idiot, see Monas, Sidney, “Across the Threshold: The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale,” in Jones, Malcolm and Terry, Garth, eds., New Essays in Dostoevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 67–71 Google Scholar.

10. See, for example, Hollander, Robert, “The Apocalyptic Framework of Dostoevsky’s Idiot ,” Mosaic 7, no. 2 (1974): 123–139 Google Scholar; Bethea, David, “The Idiot: Historicism Arrives at the Station,” in his The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 62–104 Google Scholar; Cox, Roger, Between Earth and Heaven: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and the Meaning of Human Tragedy (New York: Holt, 1969), 175–191 Google Scholar; Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Minihan, Michael A. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 357–365 Google Scholar.

11. Dostoevski! saw “heavenly existence” as the time when “ne zheniatsia i ne posiagaiut, a zhivut, kak angely bozhii.” (PSS 20:173, Matt. 22:30, Mark 12:25, Luke 20:35).

12. For a detailed study of apocalyptic horses and trains in Dostoevskij, see Bethea, Shape of Apocalypse, 62-104.

13. Lebedev explicitly sees the railroads that “speshat, gremiat, stuchat” as a “kartinoi, vyrazheniem khudozhestvennym” of the age (311).

14. See Holquist, Michael, Dosloevsky and the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 114–116 Google Scholar.

15. Dalton, Elizabeth, “Myshkin’s Epilepsy,” Partisan Review 45, no. 4 (1978): 596–598 Google Scholar.

16. As Victor Terras states in his article on dissonance in The Idiot —”Dissonans v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo Idiot,” Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA 14 (1981): 65—”kosmicheskaia garmoniia ne daetsia cheloveku neposredstvenno, a dolzhna byť sozdana iz khaosa.” For a psychoanalytic interpretation of the relation between the vision of harmony and disorder—in terms of release and annihilation—see Dalton, “Myshkin’s Epilepsy,” 606-610.

17. For the best psychological interpretation of the relationship between Ippoliťs ideas and his character, see Wasiolek, Edward, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1964), 92–100 Google Scholar. Wasiolek implies, at least, that Ippoliťs vanity and egoism undercut the validity of his ideas.

18. Heschel, Abraham, Who is Man? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), 27–29 Google Scholar.

19. See Bethea, Shape of Apocalypse, 100-101.

20. For the role that the family plays in Greek tragedy, see Kojeve, Alexandre, “Notes on Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” Moderns on Tragedy, trans, and ed. Abel, Lionel (New York: Fawcett, 1967), 295–297 Google Scholar.

21. It is sometimes argued that Myshkin is really a denizen of a different world, like the child in Ler-montov’s “Angel,” who must be a stranger and failure in the “natural” world, the world of men. See, for example, Ivanov, Viacheslav, Freedom and the Tragic Life (New York: Noonday, 1960), 92 Google Scholar.

22. The case for the power of Myshkin’s passivity has, of course, been frequently argued. See, for example, Carr, E. H., Dostoevsky: 1821-1881 (London: Allen, 1947), 162–163 Google Scholar.

23. For an excellent, but different, analysis of the reader of Idiot, see the chapters on the narrator and reader in Miller, Author, Narrator, and Reader, 90-164.

24. In contrast to Prestuplenie i nakazanie, where Raskol’nikov’s resurrection into this life is celebrated by the narrator, only a small hint suggests the possibility of a similar resurrection for Rogozhin. For the case that can be made for the possibility of Rogozhin’s resurrection, see Monas, , “Across the Threshold,” in Jones, and Terry, , eds., New Essays in Dostoevsky, 67–93 Google Scholar.

25. Even a Marxist critic, like Marcuse, Herbert in The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the essence of art is its ability, in effect, to define its own reader. “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality ... to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.”

26. For a discussion, however, of the possibility of altering one’s reader, see S. J., Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975): 9–21 Google Scholar. Poulet, George in “The Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1, no. 1 (1969): 57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, speaks of the author’s “take-over” of the reader’s “innermost subjective being.”

27. According to Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 56, the rhetoric of the novel is as capable as Apocalypse or history of imposing its fictions, its order, upon us.

28. Morson, Gary Saul and Emerson, Caryl, Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 26 Google Scholar, write about Bakhtin’s conception of author and reader in Bakhtin’s early “K filosofii postupka”: “The entire drama belongs to the author. . . . The author-creator has performed an act of live entering, which the reader, too, is invited to perform.” In this article, Bakhtin stresses the active partnership of reader and author, once even using the phrase avtor-chitatel’. See Bakhtin, M. M., “K filosofii postupka,” Filosofila i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki, Ezhegodnik, 1984-1985 (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 80–160 Google Scholar.