On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel: the Brothers Karamazov and the English

On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel: The Brothers Karamazov and the English Tradition Emma K. Lieber Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Emma K. Lieber All rights reserved ABSTRACT On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel: The Brothers Karamazov and the English Tradition Emma K. Lieber This dissertation takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy’s famous contention that the works of the Russian literary canon represent “deviation[s] from European forms.” It is envisioned as a response to (or an elaboration upon) critical works that address the unique rise, formation, and poetics of the Russian novel, many of which are themselves responses (or Russian corollaries) to Ian Watt’s study of the rise of the novel in England; and it functions similarly under the assumption that the singularity of the Russian novel is a product of various idiosyncrasies in the Russian cultural milieu. The project is structured as a comparative examination of two pairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century novels from Russia and England, and as such it approaches the question of the Russian novel’s distinctiveness in the form of a literary experiment. By engaging in close readings of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) alongside Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha , 1770), and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), concentrating particularly on matters of formal design, corporeal integrity and vulnerability, and communal harmony and discord—and by understanding the English texts as a “control group” for an examination of the Russian deviation—it attempts to identify some of the distinctive features of the Russian realist novel. The largest portion of the dissertation is dedicated to The Brothers Karamazov , which I take as an emblematic work in a literary canon that is distinguished by intimations that healing and recovery—as well as the coexistence of both personal freedom and communal rapport—are possible in the real world and in realist narrative. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Note on Translations iv Introduction: On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel 1 Chapter 1: Investigations into the Unpoliced Novel: Moll Flanders and The Comely Cook 39 Chapter 2: Form and Body in Bleak House 109 Chapter 3: The Brothers Karamazov : Slouching Toward Transcendence 156 Chapter 4: The Brothers Karamazov : Approaching Form 225 Conclusion: A Glance Forward 272 Works Cited 281 i Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to Liza Knapp, who has guided me not only through all stages of the dissertation, but also through graduate school generally. She is an inspiring thinker, a generous intellectual guide, and an intuitive reader and listener, and much of my thinking has originated either in coursework with her, or in one of our many conversations during the writing of the dissertation. I can only hope, as I carry on in the field, to live up to her example as a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. I would also like to express my thanks to Cathy Popkin, who has advised and encouraged me throughout my time at Columbia. I am especially grateful for her remarkable ability, as a reader, to combine the utmost enthusiasm with the most clear- eyed skepticism. Cathy Nepomnyashchy has been an intellectual marvel for me—for the excitement and breadth that she brings to her own and others’ work, and also for being the fastest deep reader I have ever met. My gratitude goes to Nicholas Dames and Robert Belknap for their insightful readings, and for the lively conversation that they inspired at the defense. Thank you to the Whiting Foundation for a dissertation-completion fellowship, which allowed me to concentrate solely on writing throughout the 2010-11 academic year. My family would argue that they need no acknowledgment—which only means that they deserve it the most. Ella, Ben, and Alex, I love you very much! Since all good Slavists know that expression sullies our most heartfelt sentiments, on my gratitude and devotion to Aaron and Martin I will remain feelingfully silent. ii For my mother iii Note on Translations The translations of quotations taken from Russian works are my own, unless otherwise noted. For the quotations from The Brothers Karamazov , I have given citation information from the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (abbreviated PSS in the parenthetical citations), as well as from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation (abbreviated PV). Where it has been necessary to transliterate Russian, I have used the Library of Congress system without diacritical marks, although the names of well-known Russian writers are given in their more familiar forms (i.e., Dostoevsky rather than Dostoevskii). iv 1 Introduction On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel In 1868, Leo Tolstoy stated, famously, that Russian literature as a body of work represented a “deviation from European form,” and the distinctiveness of the Russian literary tradition is by now almost a commonplace notion among students of the Russian canon (PSS 16:7). As an aspect of a greater sense of cultural difference, and of a national self-conception whose various spokespeople have offered such concepts as “the Russian idea,” “the Russian point of view,” and the abstract noun “Russianness,” the imagined uniqueness of Russian literature often provokes heated discussion. Especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critics’ perspectives often depended on their own ideological positioning: whether it was Virginia Woolf, for example, attempting to infuse her native tradition with the “seething whirlpools” she found in Dostoevsky (“The Russian Point of View” 178); or Henry James, positioning his own cerebral art in opposition to the passionate excesses of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; or Russian readers of various persuasions (Slavophile, Westerner, Soviet) appropriating their national literature in the service of one ideology or another: the Russian canon has often been the object of both intense animus and affection, and it incites discussions that tend toward either extreme—a testament to both the vitality and the pitfalls of the debate. But, though such conversations are unquestionably reductive, their fundamental essentialism is frequently mitigated by the specificity of the line of inquiry. Hence such articles as Donald Fanger’s “On the Russianness of the Russian Nineteenth-Century Novel” (which attempts to articulate what he calls the “formal eccentricity” of the Russian novel) (46) and more recently William Mills Todd III’s “The Ruse of the 2 Russian Novel” (which strives to locate the “institutional circumstances” of the Russian novel that distinguish it from the English, French, or American novel form) (403). Such critical investigations, carried out by Slavicists whose partisan enthusiasms are in no way disguised, nevertheless manage to give shape to readers’ intuitions about the distinctive offerings of the Russian literary heritage without relying on grandiosity or cliché. As suggested by these titles, it is in the arena of the novel (and especially the nineteenth-century novel) that the Russian literary particularity is most frequently investigated. Tolstoy made his observation primarily in reference to works, such as Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin , Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls , Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time , and of course his own War and Peace , which present themselves either implicitly or explicitly as subversions of the novel form. It does appear that it is in the novel in particular that the Russian deviation can be detected most distinctly. This can be explained partly by the fact that it was with the nineteenth-century novel that the Russians first entered the world literary scene, so that the novel became the space both for Russian writers’ attempts at self-definition against the backdrop of Western forms and for Western readers’ discovery of Russian literature. But it also, surely, has to do with the novel genre itself. In The Rise of the Novel , Ian Watt located the birth of the novel within a complex of philosophical and socioeconomic developments taking place in early eighteenth-century England, associating traditional novelistic epistemology with the “individualism” ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment empiricism, the Puritan work ethic, scientific rationalism, and the rise of the urban middle class—cultural developments and new ways of thinking that, if they migrated to Russia at all, did not take firm root there. In the West, the nineteenth century also ushered in the naturalistic 3 and deflationary science of Charles Darwin, whose discoveries challenged all inherited notions, as he put it, of “morals and metaphysics” (quoted in Phillips 42) and whose evolutionary theory had an extremely fraught afterlife in Russia. 1 Indeed, it is not surprising that some of the more fervent celebrations of the “Russianness” of the Russian novel have been put forward by ideology-driven Soviet critics whose national pride rested on Russia’s imagined literary vanquishing of the West, although even pre-Soviet critics also understood the national literary uniqueness to be predicated in part on the absence of a Russian counterpart to the secularized Western bourgeoisie. 2 1 The influence of Darwin on the English novel in particular has been investigated most extensively by Gillian Beer ( Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction ) and George Levine ( Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction ), who both attribute the pessimism of the English novel to the suspicion, grounded in evolutionary theory, that, as Beer writes "the optimistic, 'progressive' reading of development can never expunge that other insistence that extinction is more probable than progress, that the individual life span is never a sufficient register for change or for the accomplishment of desire . ." (6). Certainly, Defoe predates Darwin, and On the Origin of Species had not been published when Dickens wrote Bleak House .

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