UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Desire, Event, Vision: Forms of Intersubjectivity in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jt1312d Author Johnson, Zachary Samuel Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Desire, Event, Vision: Forms of Intersubjectivity in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel by Zachary Samuel Johnson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Lyubov Golburt, Chair Professor Eric Naiman Professor Dorothy Hale Spring 2016 Desire, Event, Vision: Forms of Intersubjectivity in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel © 2016 by Zachary Samuel Johnson Abstract Desire, Event, Vision: Forms of Intersubjectivity in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel by Zachary Samuel Johnson Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Lyubov Golburt, Chair This dissertation contends that the philosophical problem of the existence of other people constitutes a central preoccupation of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, a problem that its authors worked through not only in the content of their novels but on the level of form, as well. At the heart of this study, which examines the emergence of the Russian realist novel in the years between 1850 and 1880, is the following question: How is the Russian understanding of the modern self (subjectivity) related to the formal aesthetic features of the Russian novel? I focus on three novels – Ivan Turgenev’s Rudin (1856), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), and Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77) – in order to account for relations between subjectivity and form in the nineteenth-century Russian novel as well as these authors’ various conceptualizations of the human subject. In each of the novels I identify a mediating concept that unites that novel’s most conspicuous formal features to its (implicit) understanding and representation of intersubjectivity. In Rudin, Demons, and Anna Karenina, these concepts are desire, event, and vision, respectively. My chapters describe how these concepts exert a decentering force on the subject, interrupting the subject’s ability to take efficacious action, to engage in self-conscious rational reflection, and ultimately to make meaning of his or her life. At the same time, these forces of desire, the event, and vision also bind subjects together, constituting the intersubjective structures that my close readings seek to describe. Methodologically, my dissertation stages a dialogue between twentieth-century theories of the novel and the nineteenth-century Russian novel, in order to articulate the relationship between the categories of subjectivity and form. Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in questions of form within novel studies, particularly with respect to the novel’s role in the formation and representation of the human subject. My dissertation contributes to this current turn towards form, marking out a place for the nineteenth- century Russian novel. Approaches to the novel in the field of Slavic studies, for historical as well as ideological reasons, have not fully benefitted from the challenges as well as insights offered by contemporary novel theory; post-structuralist theories represent a particularly conspicuous gap this dissertation seeks to fill. 1 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Recognition and Desire in Turgenev’s Rudin 11 Chapter 2 The Subject and the Event in Dostoevsky’s Demons 51 Chapter 3 Subjectivity and Double-Vision in Anna Karenina 85 Coda The Adventures of Epic Literature 115 Works Cited 121 i Acknowledgements I am first of all deeply grateful to Irina Paperno and Harsha Ram, whose early support and willingness to take a chance on a mathematician are the reasons that I had the opportunity to study what I love in UC Berkeley’s department of Slavic Literatures and Languages. I cannot imagine having a better dissertation committee. I want to acknowledge Luba Golburt’s tireless support, unfailing optimism, and continual encouragement for my project. But more than that, I am grateful for the space she created for my own thinking and intellectual development in countless office hours, exchanges over email, and feedback on my writing. I am grateful to Eric Naiman, whose writing and thinking models how alive, joyful, and playful – without ever sacrificing intellectual rigor – good literary scholarship can and ought to be. And to Dorothy Hale, whose rare combination of analytical brilliance, warm kindness, and unwavering commitment to her students remains a model for me. I am also thankful for those early relationships with the Slavic department’s graduate students, who actively cultivated a supportive community. In particular, Molly Brunson, Alyson Tapp, Cameron Wiggins, Anastasia Kayiatos, Victoria Somoff, and Jessica Merrill. Thank you to my cohort – Daniel Brooks and Katya Balter – with whom I suffered and rejoiced (especially in Old Church Slavonic). I also want to acknowledge Chloë Kitzinger, whose kind soul and sharp mind provided supportive challenges to my own thinking about the Russian novel. To my museum partner Lily Scott, and to the many current graduate students with whom I have been blessed to work. I owe a debt to the many students whom I had the great privilege to teach during my tenure as a graduate student instructor. Their moving responses to the literature we read together repeatedly reminded me of why I’ve chosen this vocational path. Finally, a deep-felt gratitude to Eric, Signy, and Suzannah – that original community that I will carry within me for the rest of my life. Solomon Hughes, without whose support this dissertation might not have been written. And to Michael, for walking with me for over two decades. ii A Note on Transliteration Transliterations follow the Library of Congress system, except when an anglicized name has been well-established (e.g. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Zhukovsky, Mandelstam). The scholarly apparatus, however, follows the LOC system. iii Introduction “Philosophy, before Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, altogether ignored the existence of other people as a philosophical problem that changed the very nature of philosophizing; as for literature…” – Fredric Jameson, “The Experiments in Time” This dissertation contends that the philosophical problem of the existence of other people constitutes a central preoccupation of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, a problem that its authors worked through not only in the content of their novels but on the level of form, as well. At the heart of this study, which examines the emergence of the Russian realist novel in the years between 1850 and 1880, is the following question: How is the Russian understanding of the modern self (subjectivity) related to the formal aesthetic features of the Russian novel? I focus on three novels – Ivan Turgenev’s Rudin (1856), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), and Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77) – in order to account for relations between subjectivity and form in the nineteenth-century Russian novel as well as these authors’ various conceptualizations of the human subject. In each of the novels I identify a mediating concept that unites that novel’s most conspicuous formal features to its (implicit) understanding and representation of intersubjectivity. In Rudin, Demons, and Anna Karenina, these concepts are desire, event, and vision, respectively. My chapters describe how these concepts exert a decentering force on the subject, interrupting the subject’s ability to take efficacious action, to engage in self-conscious rational reflection, and ultimately to make meaning of his or her life. At the same time, these forces of desire, the event, and vision also bind subjects together, constituting the intersubjective structures that my close readings seek to describe. These concepts represent the particular ways in which the existence of other people constitutes both a problem and a solution for the Russian conception of the modern subject. The Russian novel, in comparison to its Western-European counterpart, is not singular in its representation of both a social world and a character’s interiority.1 And yet what is perhaps distinctive about the artistic projects of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy is not only these authors’ interests in developing both a social world and their characters’ interiority, or their pursuit of “impossibly large ideas,”2 but the ways their novels fused these three strains, and in so doing inscribed into their novels an implicit philosophy of the subject, a theory of the relationship between a character’s interiority and the external world. My study begins with Turgenev’s 1856 novel Rudin, which can be read as a critique of Russian identity and its representation: the problem of the representation of Rudin’s subjectivity becomes the “subject” of the novel. Turgenev’s problematizing of 1 George Eliot’s Middlemarch arguably does the same, and boasts nearly as many characters as the typical Russian novel. 2 William Mills Todd III, “The Ruse of the Russian Novel.” In The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes, edited by Franco Moretti, 401-23 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 423. 1 the identity of his hero can be extended to the identity of the Russian novel itself, still in its early stages of development in the mid-1850s. Turgenev’s Rudin is also, arguably, the first Russian novel that could be formally recognized as such with respect to the generic conventions established by the European novel, and consequently it inaugurates the period of high Russian realism on which this study focuses. Of my three authors, Turgenev was the only one to receive formal philosophical training in German Idealism, making his Rudin a logical starting point for an articulation of the Russian novel’s implicit theory of the social. The representation of the subject that we encounter in Rudin is that of the (Hegelian) desiring subject seeking recognition.