Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative by Frederick T. Griffiths (review)

Book Reviews79 FREDERICK T. GRIFFITHS and STANLEY J. RABINOWITZ. Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990. 184 p. This small book (147 pages oftext) is a worthwhile and original contribution not only to scholarship on Gogol and on the Russian novel, but also to the theory of the novel in its relationship to epic. The book consists of three chapters. The first, "Epic and Novel," establishes the theoretical basis for the two analytical chapters: "Gogol in Rome," the book's central chapter, concerned primarily with Dead Souls, and "Dostoevsky's TAe Brothers Karamazov." The study is provocative throughout, beginning with the title Novel Epics instead of the more familiar formulation, "epic novels." This reversal forces the reader to ask what is intended and thus to think about the relationship between novel and epic, a central concern of the book. It even seems to me that there is a deliberate ambiguity eis to the syntactic relationship ofthe two terms ofthe title: are they nouns in apposition (novel-epics), or does novel here function as an adjective rather than a literary term (new or unconventional epics)? The relationship between novel and epic is addressed most directly, and in part polemically, in the first chapter, much ofwhich is a critique ofLukacs' and Bakhtin's theories on the subject. These two eure probably chosen eis targets ofthe polemic not only as the two most prominent contemporary theorists to write on the subject, and not only for their specific theories, but also eis representatives of certain conventional views on the epic, above all ofthe idea that the epic is a wholly defunct literary form, a closed chapter in the evolution of literature. For it is the view of Griffiths and Rabinowitz that the epic is continuously being resurrected—"From epoch to epoch the form comes unexpectedly alive only to find another consummation and die yet another final death" (15)—and in practice is more complex and unstable than it appears to be in retrospect, as part of the canon. In other words, the monophonie (as Bakhtin sees it) nature ofepic is more a matter ofreception than ofgeneration; epics as actually written involve a dialectic process of advancing the epic tradition that makes it impossible to separate "epic" and "novelistic" as neatly as Bakhtin's theory proposes. In fact, it is misleading to even pose the compeurison of epic and novel, because the epic is more accurately seen eis a tradition, a process, rather than a category or genre, "a mode ofother genres rather than a form unto itself (38). The rest of the book, then, examines the question of the place of the epic tradition in Russian literature, but from an unconventional perspective and on unexpected material. When we think ofthe epic novel in Russia, we usually think first of all of War and Peace and of such simileur broad canvases as TAe Quiet Don (or, as Griffiths and Rabinowitz have written about elsewhere and mention briefly in this book, Doctor Zhivago), rather than of the GogolDostoevsky line of development. Griffiths and Rabinowitz, however, show convincingly that the epic tradition impacts the evolution ofthe Russian novel virtually from the outset, in Gogol's Dead Souls, and reappears in such an unexpected place eis TAe Brothers Karamazov. 80Rocky Mountain Review Griffiths and Rabinowitz are not the first, of course, to approach the topic of Dead Souls and the epic. Gogol himself pointed to the connection with his subtitle Poema (meaning in Gogol's time, as it does today, a long narrative poem, including but not limited to the epic), by his high praise of Homer, eind by his hints that he had in mind a trilogy along the lines ofthe Divine Comedy, in which what we know as Dead Souls (Part One) would correspond to the Inferno. And the influences ofHomer and Dante on the novel have been studied elsewhere. Griffiths eind Rabinowitz, however, eire less concerned with stylistic influences or borrowing of motifs, on which the eeirlier studies tend to focus, as in Carl Proffer's TAe Simile and Gogol's Dead Souls and A.A. Asoyan's "Zametki o dantovskikh motivakh u Belinskogo i Gogolia." Instead, they focus on...