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Dostoevskii in Siberia: Remembering the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Harriet Murav
Harriet Murav*
Affiliation:
Russian Department, University of California, Davis
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Extract

In “Muzhik Marei,” which appeared in the February issue of Dnevnik pisatelia for 1876, Fedor Dostoevskii “remembers” an experience from his time in Siberia. During Easter week the drunken carousing of his fellow convicts (which, he writes, “tormented me nearly to the point of illness” “do bolezni isterzalo menia”) had driven him out of the barracks into the yard. There he met the Polish prisoner, Miretskii, who said, “Je hais ces brigands” (22:46). These words drive Dostoevskii right back to the place from which, as he says, only fifteen minutes before, he had fled “kak bezumnyi.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 858 - 866
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

1. All quotations are from Dostoevskii, F.M., Polnoe sobrante sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972.)Google Scholar.

2. For other discussions, see, for example, Kabat, Geoffrey C., Ideology and Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 67–71 Google Scholar. Frank, Joseph discusses the problem of conversion in his Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1983), 116–127 Google Scholar. For Jackson, Robert Louis, the crucial ingredient of Dostoevskii’s Siberian experience is the development of his artistic vision; see his “The Triple Vision: ‘The Peasant Marei’,” Yale Review (Winter 1978): 225–235 Google Scholar.

3. Morson, Gary Saul, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), x.Google Scholar Citations to this work will be referred to in the text by Boundaries and page number in parentheses.

4. See also Grossman, Leonid, “The Stylistics of Stavrogin’s Confession: A Study of the New Chapter of The Possessed ,” trans. O’Connor, Katherine Tientan, in Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Miller, Robin Feuer (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 148–158 Google Scholar. Grossman, ’s essay originally appeared as part of his book, Poetika Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Gos. akademiia khudozh. Nauk, 1925)Google Scholar.

5. The analysis is found in Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963)Google Scholar. All quotations taken from Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Citations to this work will be referred to in the text by Problems and page number in parentheses.

6. Barbara Howard calls this the “Underground Man’s blatant attempts to forestall his reader’s criticisms,” which she understands as an exaggeration of a similar but more subtle process in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. See “The Rhetoric of Confession: Dostoevski’s Notes from Underground and Rousseau’s Confessions ,” in Miller, , ed., Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, 64–73 Google Scholar.

7. AU quotations from Miller, Robin Feuer, “Dostoevsky and Rousseau: The Morality of Confession Reconsidered,” in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, ed. Jackson, Robert Louis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 82–97 Google Scholar. Citations to this work will be referred to in the text by “Morality” and the page number in parentheses.

8. Emerson, Caryl, “The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language,” in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Morson, Gary Saul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

9. All quotations are taken from Emerson’s translation, which appears in Problems, appendix 2, 283-302. “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” was first published in 1976.

10. Emerson points to the difficulties inherent in identity that depends on another. Even the words left over, saved for the self, “must in turn be finalized from without in order to achieve any stability of definition, any biographical validity” (See Emerson, , “Problems with Bakhtin’s Poetics,” Slavic and East European Journal 32 [Winter 1988]: 503–525.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

11. For a discussion of the introduction to Zapiski iz mertvogo doma that reaches similar conclusions, see Robert Louis Jackson, “The Narrator in House of the Dead,” in idem, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 33-70.

12. For these as characteristics of the experience of conversion, see James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random, 1902)Google Scholar, lectures 9 and 10: 186-254. For a discussion of the way that religious experience may be constituted by concepts, beliefs, and practices, see Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 75–118 Google Scholar and 184-189. Frank, Joseph also discusses the problem of conversion in his Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 116–118 Google Scholar.

13. Another layer of complexity exists in this and other instances discussed by Miller, namely the question of whether the hero knows that his utterances are parodie and what effect that knowledge or lack of it has on the hero’s characterization and on the parody itself. The underground narrator knowingly refers to Rousseau, but in another instance that Miller describes (Ferdyshenko’s confession in Idiot) Ferdyshenko does not seem to know that his theft is a literary plagiarism from Rousseau’s Confessions. For a discussion of this problem, see Bernstein, Michael André, “When the Carnival Turns Bitter” in Bakhtin, ed. Morson, , 103–105.Google Scholar

14. See Kovacs, Arpad, “The Poetics of The Idiot: On the Problem of Dostoevsky’s Thinking about Genre” in Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Miller, , 116–126.Google Scholar Citation on 120.

15. The letter was written to A. N. Strakhov. See Dostoevskii, F. M., Pis’ma, ed. Dolinin, A. S. (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930) 2:363 Google Scholar. For Dolinin’s discussion of Rousseau and Dostoevskii, see 510-511. Dolinin relates Dostoevskii’s use of paradox in Dnevnik pisatelia to Rousseau.

16. Iu. M. Lotman speaks of Dostoevskii’s “simultaneous attraction and repulsion.” See Lotman, , “Russo i russkaia kul’tura XVIII-nachala XIX veka” in Russo, Zan-Zak, Traktaty (Moscow: 1969), 603.Google Scholar

17. Catteau, Jacques has observed that the golden age represented in “Son smeshnogo cheloveka” “is much closer to Rousseau than to the Garden of Eden. “ See his Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Littlewood, Audrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 376–377 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.