The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s

Conclusion

189 Conclusion THIS STUDY HAS ARGUED that Dostoevsky’s works of the 1870s are characterized by two contradictory formal impulses. The first is expressed in Dostoevsky’s choice of an illegitimate half-peasant, half-noble adolescent for his hero in The Adolescent, a choice that represents a direct challenge to the aristocratic heroes of Tolstoy and Turgenev. It is an impulse toward fragmentation, a recognition of the necessity of representing chaotic postreform Russian reality in literary form. This impulse defines The Adolescent ’s ambiguous generic identity as “notes” and determines its hermeneutically ambivalent epilogue, which simultaneously defends and polemicizes with the work’s hesitant generic claims. It is equally present in the diverse stories of modern life that appear in the monthly column Dostoevsky wrote for Prince Meshchersky’s journal The Citizen, “A Writer’s Diary,” particularly in the disparate voices permitted to speak for themselves. This formal impulse is foreshadowed in the generic hybridity of Demons, with its ideological ambiguities and its open-endedness to multiple readings. It is present in the multilingual, heterogeneric heteroglossia of the monojournal version of A Writer’s Diary, which seeks to represent the linguistic differentiation of the postreform era. Its open-ended structure and forms seek to replicate a vision of the world as unpredictable, as continually being shaped and reshaped by the capricious forces of modernity in its many shapes and forms. This acceptance of fragmented modernity’s formal implications is reflected in Dostoevsky’s pride in being called “the poet of the underground” by mocking critics, expressed in the notebooks for The Adolescent and in his identification with his “accidental hero” even as he expresses through the voice of Arkady’s Moscow landlord his own misgivings about the risks of writing a novel that seeks to represent the amorphous forms of the age of transition. It is present in A Writer’s Diary in his fidelity to the new Babel that is postreform Russia in all its social and spiritual differentiation, and in his creation of the dark visions of “Bobok,” “The Meek One,” and the “Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” The other approach to form that we find in the works of the 1870s Conclusion 190 understands the world to be maximally interconnected and the text to be closed and self-contained. Form becomes the means by which a fragmented world can be made whole again. It embraces narrative totality and holds up the image of Christ as the transcendental sign of harmonious ideal form. It seeks to overcome linguistic differentiation with the transcendent power of the word. We see this formal impulse as early as Dostoevsky’s generic fantasy of a historical epic pitched to Maikov in 1867, an epic that seeks to move beyond the temporal horizons of the post-Petrine era, which Dostoevsky sees as restricting the traditional Russian novel. It inspires Dostoevsky’s ambition of blending hagiographic conventions with the traditional bildungsroman structure in his Life of a Great Sinner and his attempt to create a Russian aristocratic hero who could become transfigured by the power of the Russian Idea in the notebooks for Demons. This impulse finds its clearest expression in his aim of redeeming the novelistic form, of transfiguring a genre associated with the Petrine schism and making it reflect the experience of the section of Russian society who have been excluded from the Russian novel throughout most of its history. Even The Adolescent projects a version of this aspiration. Its appeal to the genre memory of the noble family novel expresses not merely the desire to overcome it, but also a dream of reintegrating the fragments of Russian literature and art shattered and dispersed by the pressures of modernization and of returning to what Dostoevsky imagines as the perfect forms of the pre-Petrine, pre-Nikonian era. But it comes closest to realization in The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevsky finally creates a generic landscape that can bring into the novel both religious experience and the social and cultural values of the soil, which he has been hoping to reintegrate into the Russian literary landscape since the reconciliatory program of Time. There is a parallel movement toward formal reintegration in Dostoevsky ’s journalism. We see it in the 1873 columns of “A Writer’s Diary” in the criteria used for picking the stories Dostoevsky shares with his readers. He seeks out any signs of the utopian future that he sees as the imminent inevitable result of the national embrace of the ideal image of...