Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the English edition
- List of abbreviations
- General editor's note on transliteration and references
- General introduction
- PART I The creative environment
- PART II The process of creation
- Part III Time and space in the world of the novels
- Introduction
- 19 The master of men and hours
- 20 Chronology and temporality in The Idiot
- 21 The ascending spiral
- 22 Time of power and power of time
- 23 The havens of eternity
- 24 The dream of space and the space of the real
- 25 The inventory and the expressionist orchestration of scenery and lighting
- 26 The semantics of colour
- 27 The hero in space: sighting and seeing
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index of names
20 - Chronology and temporality in The Idiot
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the English edition
- List of abbreviations
- General editor's note on transliteration and references
- General introduction
- PART I The creative environment
- PART II The process of creation
- Part III Time and space in the world of the novels
- Introduction
- 19 The master of men and hours
- 20 Chronology and temporality in The Idiot
- 21 The ascending spiral
- 22 Time of power and power of time
- 23 The havens of eternity
- 24 The dream of space and the space of the real
- 25 The inventory and the expressionist orchestration of scenery and lighting
- 26 The semantics of colour
- 27 The hero in space: sighting and seeing
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index of names
Summary
The splendour of the world is enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed.
Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto (1909)The novels of Dostoyevsky are violently at odds with human and biological rhythm. Reader, hero and even author are carried off into a whirlwind of events, dialogues, sensations and ideas, into a world whose natural element is the tempest. In the epilogue, the reader staggers out of the adventure like someone who has jetted through a storm at high speed, exhausted by this extraordinary explosion of vitality. The sensation of speed, however, does not appear fantastic or unreal; it conveys a feeling of superabundant incandescent reality, intense experience, tragic depth. The novels appear realistic partly because Dostoyevsky was passionately interested in the details of contemporary daily life, using the latest news items in his novels (most of his heroes are keen readers of newspapers), drawing migrant images from the collective thought of the time, and invariably setting the action in the changing modern town. But the reader believes in the reality of the novels mainly because the temporality, the time experienced, is accompanied discreetly but continuously by a precise chronology which establishes an objective time, from which the hero is struggling to escape.
Before we analyse the dynamics of the Dostoyevskian novel in the following chapter, we shall consider the time scheme of The Idiot, an exemplary work which Claudel admired for its composition, and which we chose because it is a bridge between Crime and Punishment and the last three great novels and because it contains nearly all the temporal forms to which we shall make reference.
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- Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation , pp. 336 - 353Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989