IMITATIONS OF CHRIST: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

The ideal of Christ was the final cause and aim of Dostoevsky's poetic work and aesthetic thought. When Bakhtin said that the voice and image of Christ ‘must crown the world of voices, organize and subdue it’, he added in an interesting footnote that ‘such an ideal, authoritative image which is not contemplated, but followed’ was ‘never realised’ in Dostoevsky's work, but was ‘only envisioned by Dostoevsky as the ultimate limit of his artistic projects’. Not perfectly realised, true enough. For a limit, by definition, is some ultimate point, or fixed value to which a series progressively converges but can never reach or equal in a finite number of terms. But this ideal limit was most closely approximated in The Brothers Karamazov. Every aspect of poetic memory ultimately leads to the memory of Christ. We may designate this master memory as the ‘dominant’, which Jakobson defines as ‘the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines and transforms the remaining components’. And given that we have to do with a dominant that is a divine ideal, it also transcends all the novel's components.