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131 Chapter Four Between Babel and a New Word: A Writer’s Diary as Monojournal IN THE SHORT STORY “DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN,” published in the April 1877 issue of A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky provides a powerful account of narrative collapse in the face of an ineffable transcendent ideal. The ridiculous man is saved from suicide by a redemptive vision, yet he is unable to communicate that vision to those around him. The gulf between the transcendent ideal of his vision and the disordered chaos of the world he inhabits is expressed in terms of a communication breakdown: “But how we are to build paradise I do not know, because I do not have the words to express it. I lost the words after my dream. At least all the main words, the most essential ones. But never mind: I shall go off and keep talking tirelessly ” (25:118).1 Faced by this verbal inadequacy, he hovers between hope and despair, between the need for narration and the awareness of its shortcomings. He resolves to keep on talking, to churn out an endless stream of words in an attempt to express his vision, the image of a prelapsarian world, an insight into the time before the social and metaphysical fragmentation brought by the differentiation of language itself. As he contemplated mid-1870s Russia, with its processes of social, intellectual , and spiritual breakdown, Dostoevsky shared the ridiculous man’s dream of a world where linguistic unity still reigned. The era of social transition , the age of razlozhenie and obosoblenie, had given rise to a new Babel as political polarization brought with it an increased sense of social differentiation , a proliferation of languages, worldviews, and belief systems as foreign to each other as to the traditional intellectual and spiritual institutions they opposed. In this reincarnation of A Writer’s Diary as a freestanding autonomous work, a monojournal, Dostoevsky hoped to bring a messianic “new word” to the dissociated intellectuals whose rootless secular ideologies he saw as undermining the core spiritual values of the Russian nation, a “new word” that would unify these disparate groups and reignite their faith in the Readings 132 Russian people and the Orthodox faith.2 Yet even as he sought to defy history with his prophetic vision, he could not ignore the cacophony of voices around him. As he attempted to understand the cultural undercurrents of the social ferment he read about every day in the Petersburg press, he tried to represent the full spectrum of the divergent discourses that existed in the Russian Empire’s newspapers, courtrooms, and lecture halls. In A Writer’s Diary he represented these dissonant voices in the full chaotic glory of their diversity, demonstrating the multiplicity of languages that existed in this new Babel. Even more than his columns in The Citizen, the monojournal incarnation A Writer’s Diary tries to reconcile two creative visions that are ideologically and formally incompatible: on the one hand, the conception of a multilingual, heterogeneric heteroglossia that seeks to compensate for the fragmentation of the postreform era through a diverse combination of voices and perspectives and through the sheer power of narration; on the other, a utopian dream of overcoming communication breakdown and uniting the diffuse elements of Russian society through the Word of the Orthodox Christ. Dostoevsky seeks simultaneously to represent these divergent discourses and to counteract them with his own unifying discourse. The incompatibility of these two endeavors creates a hermeneutic tension that is present from start to finish and pulls the reader in radically different directions. If The Adolescent depicts a narratological education and The Brothers Karamazov models a trial of genres, then A Writer’s Diary constitutes a verbal battleground , the clash of two different approaches to the word. A continuation of the columns he had written in 1873–74 for The Citizen, A Writer’s Diary was another incarnation of the project he had described in the notebooks and epilogue to The Adolescent, an attempt to convey in literary form the discrete phenomena of the new social reality he saw unfolding around him in the streets of Petersburg, in the far-off capitals of Western Europe, on the battlefields of the Balkans, and in the peasant villages of central Russia. Journalism served as a platform from which Dostoevsky could engage more directly with contemporary life, providing him with a different set of generic demands and code of representation from those offered by the novel.3 The formal demands of...

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