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Dostoevsky's Greatest Characters Dostoevsky’s Greatest Characters ALSO BY BERNARD J. PARIS Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (1965) A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (1974) Character and Conflict in Jane Austen’s Novels: A Psychological Approach (1978) Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature, Ed. (1986) Shakespeare’s Personality, Ed. with Norman Holland and Sidney Homan (1989) Bargains with Fate: Psychological Crises and Conflicts in Shakespeare and His Plays (1991) Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: The History and the Roman Plays (1991) Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding (1994) Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature (1997) The Therapeutic Process: Essays and Lectures by Karen Horney, Ed. (1999) The Unknown Karen Horney: Essays on Gender, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, Ed. (2000) Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses to Her Experiments in Life (2003) Conrad’s Charlie Marlow: A New Approach to “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim (2005) Dostoevsky’s Greatest Characters: A New Approach to “Notes from Underground,” Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov Bernard J. Paris DOSTOEVSKY’S GREATEST CHARACTERS Copyright © Bernard J. Paris, 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37133-4 ISBN 978-0-230-61056-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230610569 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: February 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013 For Jeffrey Berman Franz Epting Phyllis Grosskurth Norman Holland Celia Hunt Peter Rudnytsky Cherished friends, esteemed colleagues And in memory of Andrew and Tania Tershakovec CONTENTS Preface xi I “Notes from Underground” 1 History and Personality 3 i My Approach versus Frank’s and Bakhtin’s 3 ii Oppression and Suffering 6 iii Inner Conflicts 9 iv A Spiteful Official 13 2 Zverkov and Liza 17 i Daydreams, the Visit to Simonov, and the Dinner for Zverkov 17 ii Liza in the Brothel 23 iii Liza’s Visit 27 3 The Diarist 33 i Introduction 33 ii Why Can’t He Act? 35 iii “That Strange Enjoyment” 38 iv The Most Advantageous Advantage 42 II Crime and Punishment 4 Rhetoric in Crime and Punishment 51 i Introduction 51 ii My Approach versus Bakhtin’s 52 iii Dostoevsky’s Rhetorical Techniques 56 iv Fashionable Modern Unbelief 58 v The Right-minded Characters 63 vi Dostoevsky’s Perspective 71 viii CONTENTS 5 History and Inner Conflicts 73 i Introduction 73 ii Raskolnikov and His Family 74 iii Inner Conflicts 82 iv An Extraordinary Man 86 v After the Murder 89 6 Sonya, Svidrigaylov, and Raskolnikov’s Conversion 95 i Introduction 95 ii Raskolnikov and Sonya 96 iii Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov 105 iv Raskolnikov’s Conversion 108 v The Happy Ending of Crime and Punishment 112 III The Brothers Karamazov 7 Thematic Analysis of The Brothers Karamazov 117 i Introduction 117 ii Ivan’s Challenge 119 iii Contradiction in Ivan’s Position 124 iv Responses to Ivan 126 v Seeds That Bear Much Fruit 128 vi We Are Responsible for All 131 vii Freedom versus Happiness 133 8 Ivan: Character Structure and Beliefs 135 i Introduction 135 ii Detachment 136 iii Anger and Aggression 139 iv Search for Glory 143 v The Grand Inquisitor 146 9 Ivan: Before the Murder 155 i The Emergence of Ivan’s Inner Conflicts 155 ii Ivan and Smerdyakov 159 iii Temptation and Fall 163 10 Ivan: After the Murder 169 i Introduction 169 ii The First Meeting with Smerdyakov 170 CONTENTS ix iii The Second Interview 173 iv The Final Visit to Smerdyakov 176 v. Continued Inner Conflicts 180 11 Alyosha: History, Personality, and Relationship with Zossima 189 i Introduction 189 ii Alyosha and His Mother 192 iii Alyosha’s Defenses 194 iv Alyosha and Father Zossima 199 v Zossima’s Teachings 201 12 Alyosha: Trials and Resolutions 207 i Alyosha in the World 207 ii Comforts and Complications 212 iii Rebellion: The Death of Zossima 216 iv Raised from the Depths 218 v One of the Elect 220 vi Conclusion 222 References 225 Index 229 PREFACE One of the supreme achievements of realistic writers is the creation of what E. M. Forster calls “round” characters—complex, multifaceted, inwardly motivated beings who resemble people like ourselves. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky are the two greatest creators of such characters. I have discussed Shakespeare’s characters in two previous studies (Paris 1991a, 1991b); I shall focus on Dostoevsky’s here. Not all round characters are created equal. As Shlomith Rimmon- Kenan points out, there is a continuum from lesser to greater degrees of “complexity, development,” and “penetration into the inner life” (1996, 41). In my view, Dostoevsky’s greatest character creations are the underground man, Raskolnikov, and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov; and I shall concentrate on them in this book. It is a curious phenomenon that, although criticism abounds with tributes to Dostoevsky’s remarkable insight into human nature, suffi- cient justice has not yet been done to his genius in characterization. One of the chief reasons for this is that Dostoevsky is a great philo- sophical novelist, and his characters have such a rich and absorbing ideological interest that attention tends to be focused on their the- matic significance rather than on their motivations, personalities, and relationships. Ernest Simmons observes that “we never seem to think of Dostoevsky’s characters absolutely in terms of themselves” but “rather in terms of the ideas which they personify” (1940, 267). The ideas they personify are important, but to appreciate Dostoevsky’s achievement, we must look at his characters as beings of interest in themselves and not just through them to what we think the author is using them to say. Another reason why Dostoevsky’s skill in characterization has not been fully explored is that critics who are sympathetic to his ideology tend to feel, with Eliseo Vivas, that in his fiction the metaphysical level “informs” or is “below” the psychological level (1955, 58, 64). As Vivas xii PREFACE suggests, Dostoevsky’s object was to present portrayals of life that would show spiritual forces at work in the world and demonstrate the inadequacy of naturalistic explanations to account for the mysteries of the human soul. This produces a paradoxical situation: Dostoevsky created great psychological portraits, but he did not want us to under- stand them psychologically. If we try to account for his characters’ behavior as products of their personalities and experiences, we are going against his fundamental assumption that humans are spiritual beings who cannot be adequately comprehended from an empirical point of view. Nonetheless, I argue that the behavior of Dostoevsky’s greatest characters is intelligible in psychological terms. Dostoevsky was not only a philosophical novelist committed to reaffirming man’s spiritual nature and destiny in the face of contemporary secular thought, he was also a realistic novelist who created characters of such depth and complexity that they can be understood independently of their illus- trative function. That is one reason why his novels appeal not only to those who subscribe to his beliefs but also to those who disagree. Although I often quarrel with Dostoevsky’s interpretations of his characters, I am awestruck by the subtlety and depth of his psycho- logical portraiture. It may be one of the ironies of criticism that this aspect of Dostoevsky’s art cannot be properly appreciated by those who share his assumptions about human nature and the human con- dition, but only by those who have a different perspective. I shall reverse the order of priorities Vivas has proposed. That is, I shall argue that the psychological level “informs” or underlies the metaphysical—that the behavior and beliefs of Dostoevsky’s greatest characters flow from their personalities and experiences and from the strategies of defense these have led them to develop. I shall also reverse Joseph Frank’s derivation of the characters’ personalities from their ideas, which he tends to ascribe to the intellectual climate of their times (1986, 1995, 2002). I shall argue that the characters are so responsive to certain currents of thought because they are psychologi- cally predisposed toward them to begin with. Although most commentators discuss Dostoevsky’s characters in thematic terms, often treating them as coded messages from the author that it is the critic’s job to decipher, not everyone has done this. Two major exceptions have been psychoanalytic critics and Mikhail Bakhtin. The approach I shall employ here has something in common with both, but it will also be different in many ways. PREFACE xiii There is a substantial body of psychoanalytic criticism that dis- cusses Dostoevsky’s characters in motivational terms. I shall do the same thing, but not in the same way. Whereas most psychoanalytic criticism employs a diachronic approach that explains the present in terms of very early experience, I shall draw on the predominantly syn- chronic theory of Karen Horney, which explains a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in terms of their function within the present structure of the psyche.
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