The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century

Kinesic Observations on F. M. Dostoevsky's Novel Demons

Kinesic Observations on F. M. Dostoevsky's Novel Demons* S. B. Pukhachev "Kinesiticheskie nabliudeniia nad romanom F. M. Dostoevskogo 'Besy,'" in Dostoevskii i sovremen nost': Materialy XX M ezhdunarodnykh Starorusskikh chtenii 2005 gada, ed. V. V. Dudkin et. al. (Velikii Novgorod: Novgorodskii gosudarstvennyi ob"edinennyi muzei-zapovednik, 2006), 269-87. Analysis of the corporeal behavior of literary characters holds grea t promise as a field of scholarly research1 Within the framework of relatively young scholarly disciplines such as kinesics (the study of gestural motions), haptics (the study of tactile communication), and oculesics (the study of "eye language "), researchers have compiled a significant amount of data and have already advanced certain general claims. But the object of kinesic research has always been (and remains) real-life communicative processes among real people. The gestures of literary characters have been of interest only insofar as they might help to illustrate these real processes. Meanwhile, literary critics * Tran slator's /wte: Quotations from Dostoevsky's novels that are followed by parenthetical citations are taken from the Vintage Classics editions of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's versions: Demons (1995); The Brothers Karamazov (1991); Crime and Punishment (1993); and the Vintage edition of The Idiot (New York: Knopf, 2003), occasionally with modification, as appropriate. The PSS references follow in brackets. All quotations that appear without citation are translated directly from the present essay, without reference to the original texts or their English translations. In this essay, transliterations of character and place names confirm to the practice in the cited translations . 1 The problem of nonverbal communication has a considerable history. It was addressed on the empirical level from classical oratory through the various physiognomic schools of tl1e Middle Ages, etc. From the nineteenth century onward, thanks to the work of John Caspar Lavater, Ceorg Cristoph Licl1tenberg, Charles Bell, Charles Darwin, and Ray Birdwhistell, it has been elevated to a qualitatively different level. In the present day, the search for a unified semantic language of description (metalanguage ) and a widely accepted interpretation of the empirical material continues within the framework of nonverbal semiotics. The most important recent works in Russian are G. E. Kreidlin's foundational study Neverbal'naia sem iotika (Moscow: Novoe literatumoe obozrenie, 2002) and a general study, S. A. Crigor'eva, N. V. Crigor'ev, and C. E. Kreidlin, Siovar' iazyka ru sskikh z"estov (Moscow: Vena, 2001). Caro l Apollon io, ed. The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2010, 229-46. 230 S. B. PUKHACHEV confronted with problems of the language of the body (telesnost') in literary works have focused their attention on more expressive or striking gestures, those that appeared symbolic,2 unusual, contradictory, involuntary, unexpected , or incomplete3 The recent collection titled The Body in Russian Culture4 may be counted as a positive breakthrough for the introduction of kinesics into literary study, but it is almost entirely lacking in analyses of the bodily behavior of individual literary characters or of the characters in an individual works 111e present essay aims to expand on the approaches mentioned above by offering an analysis of the entire complex of literary characters' gestures and movements in a single work, Dostoevsky's novel Demons. The object of study here is any change in position of the body or its parts, as well as any change in the non-manual complex (gaze, facial expression, blushing(blanching, etc.), and will include the study of paralinguistic characteristics such as timbre, intonation , pitch, and so on. We should note that even in the case of such a comprehensive description of gestural behaviors in a literary work, those behaviors will differ strikingly from the behaviors of real people. A writer is not in a position to describe the entire succession of gestural behaviors or to put to paper the full wealth of expressions that may be observed in a living person6 In this sense, observers of the real processes of nonverbal communication (or viewers watching a screen adaptation of a literary work) are in a more advantageous position than the literary critic, with significantly more material for analysis at their disposal. On the other hand, in real life some gestures are based on physiological or situational factors and are devoid of communicative significance. In literary works such gestures are by definition held to a minimum. The "value" of physical motion is much greater, and the most 20. R. G. Nazirov, "Zhesty miloserdiia v romanakh Dostoevskogo," Studia Russiw, (Budapest), no. 6 (1983): 243-52...