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UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Bog znaet: The Ethics of Omniscience in Russian Narrative, 1845-1870 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58p3x9ft Author Dyne, Thomas Henry James Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Bog znaet: The Ethics of Omniscience in Russian Narrative, 1845-1870 By Thomas Henry James Dyne 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 Irina Paperno, chair Professor Eric Naiman Professor C. Namwali Serpell Spring 2019 Bog znaet: The Ethics of Omniscience in Russian Narrative, 1845-1870 © 2019 By Thomas Henry James Dyne 1 Abstract Bog znaet: The Ethics of Omniscience in Russian Narrative, 1845-1870 by Thomas Henry James Dyne Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Irina Paperno, Chair This dissertation examines how the narratives of Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy grapple with the consequences of their omniscience. Their narrators do not simply read minds and tell stories; they also become wrapped-up in the ethical implications of telling stories that require the reading of minds. In effect, they ask: what happens when narrators become godlike? Does the privilege of omniscience define—or disrupt—the novel’s ethical value? I argue that the phrase “God only knows” [Bog znaet] becomes the constant refrain of realist narrative, a performance of authority in the moment of divesting from it. In a series of close readings—from Turgenev’s early Sketches of a Hunter to his novel Fathers and Sons, from Dostoevsky’s first work Poor Folk to his late story “The Meek One,” and from Tolstoy’s earliest semi-autobiographical narrative experiments to the trilogy of novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth—I argue that the newly omniscient Russian narrator draws attention to the consequences of his gaze, highlighting the existence of a boundary in the moment he makes a display of crossing it, making sacrosanct the interior of the other in the process of laying it bare. These narratives of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy become deeply concerned with the troubling effects of their increasingly privileged intrusion into the minds of others and, in making us ever aware of the ethical consequences of reading the face to access the mind, cast a spotlight back onto our reading of them. Recent works of literary criticism—from rhetorical humanists championing the value of literature to deconstructive examinations of the ethics of reading—investigate the intersection of narrative and ethics in the novel. This dissertation brings Russian narratives of the mid nineteenth-century into this conversation, which has not yet been done by Slavic scholars. Building on recent theories of narrative ethics and omniscience, this dissertation argues that an awareness of the transgressive nature of privileged knowledge becomes clearly manifest in realist prose, even when hidden feelings and unspoken thoughts are rendered legible. These works reckon with—and invite us to attend to—the troubling effects of their increasingly privileged intrusion into the minds of others. Turgenev’s, Dostoevsky’s, and Tolstoy’s narratives rely on strategies of representation that mark themselves as instances of self-aware transgression, defining their own devices of omniscience as an ethically fraught process, caught up in the problem of making knowable what “God only knows.” i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1 “What has happened inside this man?”: the ethics of penetrating the body of the other in Turgenev’s narratives 12 Chapter 2 “That’s the horrible part: I understand everything!”: the ethics of misreading the other in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk and “The Meek One 43 Chapter 3 “I read what I ought not to know”: the ethics of overreading in Tolstoy’s early narrative omniscience 73 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………………….…..110 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….....113 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I have to acknowledge the great debt I owe to Irina Paperno, Eric Naiman, and Namwali Serpell – I could not have asked for a better, more attentive, and more encouraging committee. Thanks, too, to Dorothy Hale, for many long and illuminating discussions of narrative ethics, as well as to the rest of the faculty of the Berkeley Slavic Department, particularly Harsha Ram and Luba Golburt for their help as graduate advisers and as readers of early drafts of the papers and exam responses that would plant the seed of this dissertation. Thanks also to Anna Daniilovna Muza, without whose support and wisdom I could not have gotten through my last years of teaching Russian. Дай Бог здоровья вам, и генеральский чин. I must also thank and acknowledge the help and support of the Russian department at New York University, particularly that of Ilya Kliger, who, in giving me my first bad grade in a literature class (for trying to make up for a lack of an argument with plot summary), started me on the journey of close-reading some fifteen years ago; of Michael Kunichika, for convincing me to go to Berkeley in the first place; of Yanni Kotsonis, whose classes first made me want to become a Slavicist; of Eliot Borenstein, for giving me my first job as a college instructor; and of Irina Belodedova, for all her help navigating the early years of learning Russian. I owe so much to my wonderful cohort of colleagues and friends—partners—at the Berkeley Slavic department and beyond. I love you, Dave. And finally, thanks does not sufficiently do justice to what I owe my parents, Eileen Kennedy, James Dyne, and Mary Ann Dyne, for their constant care and support. 1 Бог знает, где бродили его мысли, но не в одном только прошедшем бродили они: выражение его лица было сосредоточенно и угрюмо, чего не бывает, когда человек занят одними воспоминаниями. “God only knows where his thoughts wandered, but they did not wander only into the past: the expression of his face was concentrated and sullen, which does not happen when a man is absorbed solely in his memories.” Fathers and Sons, Chapter IV (8:211)1 INTRODUCTION I. Бог знает What happens when narrators become godlike? Does narrative omniscience, with its penetrating gaze and access to the privileged knowledge of character interiors, define—or disrupt—the novel’s ethical value? The narratives of Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy are intensely concerned with these problems. Their narrators do not simply read minds and tell stories; they also become wrappeD-up in the ethical implications of telling stories that require the reading of minds at all. But how is an awareness of the ethical problem of knowing someone too well—of “getting” their story and fixing them in words—possibly made manifest in the tradition of Russian realist novelistic narrative, where even consciousness, unspoken feelings, and private thoughts are rendered knowable? It would seem that nineteenth-century novelistic narrative’s greatest trick—accessing interiority and, in Dorrit Cohn’s terms, making the minds of other people transparent, such that we know the characters of novels better than we could ever know each other—also engenders its most significant ethical consequences.2 In the epigraph above, the narrator of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons [Отцы и дети, 1862] defaults before God’s knowledge of his characters, begging not only ignorance, but also the very impossibility of such privileged knowledge at all. Although the narrator has just checked in on all the novel’s other main characters, peering into their bedrooms and detailing their mental states with ease, here he insteaD notes the visible illegibility of Pavel Petrovich’s thoughts: while “God only knows” their content, their direction is clearly to be seen in the expression of his face. This narrative voice, despite paying lip-service to the impenetrable sanctity of the character’s mind, in the same breath still breaks this boundary, narrating Pavel Petrovich’s thoughts by reading his face, unquestionably certain in the knowledge of which expressions correspond to which interior states. Turgenev’s narrator here attests to the unknowability of the character’s mind in the same sentence that makes it self-evident. 1 Translation aDapteD from RicharD Hare’s (1948). 2 Cohn asserts that this contraDiction lies at the heart of fictionality: the “most real” literary characters are “those we know most intimately, precisely in ways we could never know people in real life,” while the verisimilitude at the center of literary fiction relies on the communication and representation of the incommunicable anD unrepresentable. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), 5-7. 2 This moment, I argue, lays out the antinomies central to the development of narrative omniscience in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian novel. Just as the character’s thoughts are at once legible and illegible, his mind made inviolable in the moment it is also violateD, so too is narrative authority defined by an anxious flitting between two opposites. The narrator divests his gaze of any penetrative insight (“God only knows where his thoughts wandered”) in the same sentence that he relies on it (“but they did not wander only into the past”). The narrative is aware of these contradictions, and draws attention to them. I argue that “God only knows”3 indexes the way Russian narratives of the mid nineteenth-century grapple with the consequences of their nascent omniscience. With the constant refrain of “God only knows”—the bellwether of a larger process of disavowing privilege in the moment of relying on it—Turgenev’s, Dostoevsky’s, and Tolstoy’s narrative voices make visible the work of their omniscience, as well as make known their anxiety over its effects.
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