DOSTOEVSKY AT 200 This page intentionally left blank Dostoevsky at 200 The Novel in Modernity EDITED BY KATHERINE BOWERS AND KATE HOLLAND UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0863-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3865-1 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3864-4 (PDF) Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Dostoevsky at 200 : the novel in modernity / edited by Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland. Other titles: Dostoevsky at two hundred Names: Bowers, Katherine, editor. | Holland, Kate, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210153849 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021015389X | ISBN 9781487508630 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487538651 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487538644 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881 – Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH: Civilization, Modern, in literature. Classification: LCC PG3328.Z6 D6285 2021 | DDC 891.73/3 – dc23 Chapter 9 includes selections from Chloë Kitzinger, “‘A novel needs a hero …’: Dostoevsky’s Realist Character-Systems.” In Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming. Courtesy Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support from the University of Toronto Libraries in making the open access version of this title available. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. To all the Dostoevsky scholars who have shaped our scholarship, especially Robert Louis Jackson, Deborah Martinsen, and Robin Feuer Miller This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration x Introduction: Dostoevsky and the Novel in Modernity 3 katherine bowers and kate holland 1 The Poetics of the Slap: Dostoevsky’s Disintegrating Duel Plot 21 kate holland 2 Dostoevsky and the (Missing) Marriage Plot 41 anna a. berman 3 The Greasy-Haired Pawnbroker and the Capitalist Raskrasavitsa: Dostoevsky’s Businesswomen 61 vadim shneyder 4 Allegories of the Material World: Dostoevsky and Nineteenth-Century Science 81 melissa frazier 5 Dostoevsky, Sechenov, and the Reflexes of the Brain: Towards a Stylistic Genealogy of Notes from Underground 99 alexey vdovin 6 Deferred Senses and Distanced Spaces: Embodying the Boundaries of Dostoevsky’s Realism 118 sarah j. young viii Contents 7 Under the Floorboards, Over the Door: The Gothic Corpse and Writing Fear in The Idiot 137 katherine bowers 8 The Improbable Poetics of Crime and Punishment 159 greta matzner-gore 9 Illegitimacies of the Novel: Characterization in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent 177 chloë kitzinger 10 Sovereignty and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s Political Theology 196 ilya kliger Works Cited 221 Contributors 241 Index 243 Acknowledgments This volume would not have appeared without the support of a number of individuals and institutions. We are grateful to our editor, Stephen Shapiro, who helped us realize our vision and to all the authors who have written chapters for us. The project took shape at a workshop hosted by Green College at the University of British Columbia in August 2018. There Melissa Frazier, Vadim Shneyder, and we editors discussed each chapter and helped to bring them closer in dialogue with each other. We thank Melissa and Vadim for their work in Vancouver, as well as Anna Berman and Greta Matzner-Gore for their comments on the chapters during our second, virtual workshopping phase. We are grateful to the external readers for the University of Toronto Press for the constructive comments in their reports. We also would like to thank Alison Smith for her feedback. Chapters from the volume were presented and discussed in a variety of venues, especially at the Canadian Association of Slavists Annual Confer- ence at UBC in June 2019, the XVII International Dostoevsky Symposium in Boston in July 2019, and in a specially organized panel at the virtual Modern Language Association Annual Convention in January 2021. We are grateful to these audiences for the discussions that followed, which helped shape our work. The volume’s creation was supported with Bridge Funding from the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures as well as the UBC CENES Department’s Faculty Research Fund. The publication was made possible by a grant from the UBC Scholarly Publication Fund, which provided a subvention and indexing costs. We are thankful to Oksana Vynnyk for her skilled work on our index. We would like to acknowledge that the final revisions for the volume were completed under challenging circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020. We deeply appreciate the hard work of our authors in getting the revisions done during this time of intense stress and anxiety. Note on Transliteration When transliterating from Russian to English we have chosen to follow the Library of Congress system with a few exceptions. We depart from the Library of Congress system in the following cases: we use familiar English spellings of common names (such as Dostoevsky instead of Dos- toevskii, Gogol instead of Gogol', Herzen instead of Gertsen, Raskolnikov instead of Raskol'nikov, and Dmitry instead of Dmitrii). We also adapt some names to aid in pronunciation (for example: Seryozha, Alyosha, Lidiya, Alyona, Grigoryevna instead of Serezha, Alesha, Lidiia, Alena, Grigor'evna). In parenthetical citations of Russian words or phrases and throughout the notes and bibliography, we have adhered strictly to the Library of Congress transliteration system. DOSTOEVSKY AT 200 This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Dostoevsky and the Novel in Modernity katherine bowers and kate holland At the beginning of The Idiot [Idiot, 1869], Prince Myshkin meets Ro- gozhin and Lebedev in a third-class carriage on the Warsaw-Petersburg train as it approaches its destination “at full speed” [na vsekh parakh].1 The speeding train, described in the opening sentence, seems at first just a backdrop for Myshkin and Rogozhin’s introduction. Yet in fact it will be explicitly foregrounded as a symbol of catastrophic modernity. The train is a device which introduces into the novel the experience of accel- eration so particular to modernity, as analyzed by Reinhart Koselleck and others.2 As the inappropriately dressed Myshkin, coming from abroad, converses with his countrymen Rogozhin and Lebedev, the novel opens out onto time; the timeless idyll of the Switzerland Myshkin has left be- hind is contrasted with the chaotic Russian modernity into which he is arriving, encapsulated by the image of the impenetrable Nastasya Fil- ippovna. This is Myshkin’s first experience of historical time since his convalescence and his first experience of his home country, of which he knows nothing. As their conversation progresses in the railway carriage, time slows, and the characters become so engrossed in their discussion that the train’s arrival in the station even takes them by surprise. Although Myshkin and his new acquaintances forget their train’s movement, the train’s presence at the beginning of the novel emphasizes that this is a novel set squarely in the present, in modern times. Later, Lebedev ex- plicitly articulates this point when he describes the nineteenth century as “our century of vices and railways” [nash vek porokov i zheleznykh dorog] (8:315). The railway comes to represent modernity, the sense of a new temporality. In Measuring Time, Making History, Lynn Hunt examines the history of the concept of modernity and how its secondary definition, that of a comprehensive departure from traditional ideas and values, has its roots in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.3 The experience of a 4 Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland radical break in temporality, expressed most explicitly in the conceptu- alization of the French Republican calendar, can be said to inform the nineteenth-century Russian novel from its beginnings, but it becomes much more palpable in the period following the emancipation of serfs, a moment of rupture perhaps akin to that of the French Revolution in the history of the Russian empire. Hunt emphasizes the essential core of the concept of modernity as being a new way of experiencing time, invoking Koselleck’s discussion of “the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity.”4 Acceleration in Koselleck’s sense, ex- trapolates Hunt, can be seen as “the ‘constant renewal’ of the difference between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation.’”5 In other words, there is a rupture between the experience of the past and expectations for the future. As experience and expectation grow further apart, there is an acceleration to try to rush from one to the other. This sense of acceleration can be found everywhere in Dostoevsky’s novels, as it can in other nineteenth-century European texts: Baudelaire’s poetry and the novels of Dickens, Balzac, and Zola, to name a few.6 The Idiot is the first of Dostoevsky’s novels to so explicitly contextualize this process of temporal acceleration in technological as well as social, philosophical, and economic terms. Through the device of Myshkin returning from Switzerland to St Petersburg on the train, Dostoevsky stages this moment of rupture between coherent and organized past experience and inco- herent and amorphous future possibility as central to the novel that lies ahead. This volume is concerned with the ways in which the particular experience of temporality that encapsulates modernity affects the form of the novel as Dostoevsky conceives it, with the peculiar challenges the form faces as it seeks to convey the acceleration of modern life. Dostoevsky was writing at a time of remarkable change.