First Words. On Dostoevsky’s Introductions by Lewis Bagby (review)

Students, teachers, and admirers of Dostoevsky’s novels, of whom there are many, will want to have Lewis Bagby’s book at hand or nearby. In this engaging and provocative study, Bagby offers the most extensive analysis to date of what he calls Dostoevsky’s “first words,” the introductions that appear in many of Dostoevsky’s texts.

Bagby explores his subject in impressive depth and detail. He establishes his case by first explaining the importance of authorial initial utterances that introduce readers into the world of the text, arguing that introductions are “complex, multifunctional, variegated rhetorical phenomena… a literary artifact we should not take for granted, least of all in Dostoevsky’s neglected case” (xiv). He begins his study with a discussion of the diverse names Dostoevsky used to label his introductions and claims that a study of Dostoevsky’s experimentation with first words contributes to our understanding of his novels as a whole—an intriguing proposition. The task of the critic trying to analyze the variety of forms Dostoevsky’s introductions take and the reason for this variety would be, first, to provide evidence of their significance, and second, to explain Dostoevsky’s practices of embedding his introductions in the narratives—both of which Bagby does superbly.

Drawing from the work of theorist Gérard Genett, Bagby applies his typology of prefaces to Dostoevsky’s art, suggesting that Dostoevsky invented and utilized its hybrid forms. This distinction is important because it provides a necessary perspective on Dostoevsky’s unique structuring devices and invariant features of his introductions. An important gesture of Bagby’s study is his linking of Dostoevsky to his literary precursors, among them Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol. Noting that “Dostoevsky did not operate in a preface vacuum” (xvii), Bagby examines diverse models Dostoevsky was familiar with when he began using introductions with some regularity. Bagby demonstrates a commanding grasp of the early nineteenth century literary tradition; in his thoughtful exploration of a variety of writers and introductions in connection with Genette’s typology, he shows persuasively how Dostoevsky’s introductions figure in that canon.

He turns to more detailed characteristics in the next chapters dedicated individually to Dostoevsky’s writings. Working through his fiction from the last years of his exile and the first post-Siberian years, the period of Dostoevsky’s first narratives to contain introductions, Bagby finds that they “announce immediately that someone other than Dostoevsky’s alter ego speaks to us directly” (29). He traces Dostoevsky’s experiments with unreliable and limited narrators to demonstrate how Dostoevsky, through these characters, expresses his own insecurities about returning to the literary scene. Continuing with an insightful treatment of Notes from the House of the Dead, Bagby describes the emergence of an entirely new form of introduction—a frame closed off from the text—and finds a significant interplay between the implied author’s discourse and the voice of the preface’s narrator. Reshaped in the direction of multiple voicing, Dostoevsky’s preface introduces the book’s overarching thesis: “the unified image of humanity” (58). Bagby constructively demonstrates how Dostoevsky’s method of relating his first words to his narrative enriches our understanding of the novel’s essential questions.

Moving on to Dostoevsky’s introductions of the 1860s, a period when he won and preserved prominence as a successful novelist, Bagby focuses on Notes from the Underground, with specific attention to its footnoted introduction signed by Dostoevsky. Challenging the traditional viewpoint of its unified authorial voice, Bagby finds instead four distinct destabilizing voices operating in the prologue, modeling the polyphony of the larger text. Bagby’s reconsideration of the book’s prologue in this light is new and valuable in itself, and his persuasiveness in describing how the prologue participates in the larger narrative’s parodic strategies is enhanced by his impressively broad gathering of critical viewpoints on this novel. He then observes that the prologue “prepares readers to read the following inset tale with a questioning mind and an ear, sensitive to shifts...