-
New Categories for Philological Analysisand Dostoevsky Scholarship
- Slavica Publishers
- Chapter
- Additional Information
New Categories for Philological Analysis and Dostoevsky Scholarship Ivan Esaulov "Novye kategorii filologicheskogo analiza i izuchenie Dostoevskogo" (from a plenary lecture presented at the XIII Symposium of the International Dostoevsky Society, Budapest, July, 2007). Recently a major scholar, Sergei Bocharov, p ublished a transcript of some conversations with Bakhtin. Bocharov cannot be suspected of fantasizing or of inaccuracy, but some of the statements he quotes will be very difficult for Bakhtinians to accept. According to the transcript, Bakhtin felt that in his Dostoevsky book he "detached form from what was most important. I was not able to speak openly about the most important questions, those philosophical questions about the existence of God that tormented Dostoevsky throughout his life. I was constantly forced to evade the issue, to twist and turn, and to hold myself back. I even avoided mentioning the church."1 Bakhtin's unique system of poetics differs fundamentally from formalist criticism, and his works were written "under ... an unfree sky.,,2 It seems obvious to me that when we study them now, and of course when we study Dostoevsky's poetics , we can no longer ignore the critic's involuntary silence, or attempt, as Bocharov d oes, to transform this gap in his works into a virtue. Bakhtin credited Viacheslav Ivanov as being "the first to perceive the fundamental structural uniqueness of Dostoevsky's artistic world,,,3but writing as he did during the Soviet period, the critic was unable to build on Ivanov's identification of Dostoevsky's polyphonic thought as a form of sobornost,4 As a result, this central aesthetic category in Ivanov's thought re1 S. G. Bocharov, "Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug nego," Novoe liternturrlOe obouellie, no. 2 (1993): 71-72. (Here and throughou t, unless otherwise noted, Esaulov's emphasis .) 2 Ibid., 71. 3 M. M. Bakh tin, Problemy tvorchestvn Dostoevskogo (Kiev: Next, 1994), 212. This edition also reprints Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo. 4 For a more detailed discussion of the concept of "sobornost'" and its relation to the opposition between Law and Grace, see Ivan Esaulov, "Sobornost' in Nineteenth-CenCaro l Apollonio, ed., The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century, Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2010, 25- 35. 26 IVAN ESAULOV mained unavailable to Dostoevsky scholars for many decades. Bakhtin himself cannot be blamed: if he had mentioned this and other categories rela ting to the Orthodox tradition, his works would automatically have been attacked as manifestations of monarchism and Black Hundredism. Such accusations were made, for example, against Aleksei Losev after the publication of his book The Dialectics of Myth S Losev was arrested and exiled to the White Sea Canal, and the print run of his book was destroyed. Written during a time when a free exchange of opinions was still possible, Ivanov's views can help reconstruct subsequent "figures of reticence" [figury umolchaniia] in Bakhtin's work, those innovative ideas that the critic was unable to express directly. Thus the great Russian symbolist's thoughts about Dostoevsky can serve as an indispensible "commentary" to Bakhtin's works and can establish a context for understanding Dostoevsky's values, one that is deeply rooted in Russian religious culture. The Bakhtinian concept of polyphony , for example, is ontologically related to the idea of Ortl10dox sobornost ' and cannot be understood without taking it into account. Dostoevsky's works are profoundly polyphonic, and Bakhtin viewed "the church as a community [obshchenie] of unmerged [nesliial1l1ye] individuals where sinners and righteous people can corne together," as that very image "toward which Dostoevsky's [...] world strives." But in the very next paragraph of Dostoevsky's Poetics Bakhtin had to sidestep tl1e issue of the church, declaring that "the image of the churcl1 itself remains only an image, one that explains nothing in the structure of the novel.,,6 Many post-Bakhtinian scholars writing outside Russia over the years tried to fill in those gaps that Bakhtin mentioned with such regret. Nina Perlina argued that, in spite of its polyphonic nature, The Brothers Karamazov manifests a strict hierarchy of values, with Holy Scripture occupying the most authoritative position? In his book Dostoevsky after Bakhtin, Malcolm Jones is absolutely correct (if not sufficiently thorough) in his attempt to differentiate the Bakhtinian concept of "carnival," speaking, after Michel Tournier, of "white carnival" and reading Christ's gospel as a cl1allenge to the "official world."s In her study of The Brothers Karamazov, Diane Thompson convinctury Russian Literature," in Cultural Discontinuity and Reconstruction: The Byzallto-Slav heritage and the creation...