Father Zossima's Body: Decay, Abjection and Resurrection in Dostoevsky's the Brothers Karamazov
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Australian Slavonic and East European Studies (Formerly Melbourne Slavonic Studies) Journal of the Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association and of the Australian Association of Communist and Post-Communist Studies Volume 28, Nos. 1-2 2014 Australian Slavonic and East European Studies Editor: Dr Robert Lagerberg, University of Melbourne Deputy Editor: Assoc. Prof. Stefan Auer, University of Hong Kong Editorial Board Assoc. Prof. Judith Armstrong, University of Melbourne Dr Julie Fedor, University of Melbourne Dr John McNair, University of Queensland Dr Lyndall Morgan, University of Queensland Prof. Marko Pavlyshyn, Monash University Dr Alexandra Smith, University of Edinburgh Dr Ludmila Stern, University of New South Wales Dr David N. Wells, Curtin University Assoc. Prof. Kevin Windle, Australian National University ASEES is a refereed journal which publishes scholarly articles, review articles and short reviews on all aspects of Slavonic and East European Studies, in particular, language, literature, history and political science, and also art and social science. Arti- cles should have a maximum length of 8,500 words and review articles 4,000; they should be submitted to the editor electronically, preferably in .doc (Microsoft Word) format. All articles submitted for consideration should conform to the style guidelines set out in the ASEES web page. ASEES replaces Melbourne Slavonic Studies, founded in 1967 by the late Nina Christesen, which ceased publication with Volume 19, 1985. Back issues of most volumes are available for A$20.00 per issue plus GST. 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Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Monash University Dr Lynne Alice, Deakin University iv Contents STANLEY BILL Father Zossima’s Body: Decay, Abjection and Resurrection in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov ......................................................... 1 BAKTYGUL ALIEV Ethics of Communication in Dostoevsky’s Demons ..……….……….……. 33 JOHN COOK Events Set in Amber: Bakhtin’s ‘Chronotope of the Castle’ as Solidified Space-Time ................................................................................... 51 SVETLANA CHELOUKHINA From Acmeism to Avant-Garde: Mikhail Zenkevich in the Late 1910s - Early 1920s ....................................................................................... 71 ANDREW MCGREGOR, ROBERT LAGERBERG There’s Non-Place like Home: Domestic Space, Identity and (Post-)Soviet Russia in Zviagintsev’s Elena ............................................... 105 JULIE FEDOR Setting the Soviet Past in Stone: The Iconography of the New Martyrs of the Russian Orthodox Church .................................................... 121 IEMIMA D. PLOSCARIU Between Exclusion and Inclusion: Romanian Germans in Post-War Romania ...................................................................................... 155 ROBERT LAGERBERG, HEINZ L. KRETZENBACHER, JOHN HAJEK Forms and Patterns of Address in Russian: Recent Research and Future Directions .................................................................................. 179 v REVIEWS Nataliya Oryshchuk, Александр Грин: Под парусом советской культуры (Barry Scherr) ............................................................................. 211 Denis Kozlov, The Readers of ‘Novyi mir’: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Lyndall Morgan) ............................................................ 215 Kevin Windle, Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World (John McNair) ................................................. 218 Mykhailo Zubryts´kyi, Zibrani tvory i materiialy u trokh timakh. Tom 1: Naukovi pratsi (Marko Pavlyshyn) .................................................. 221 Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 225 vi STANLEY BILL FATHER ZOSSIMA’S BODY: DECAY, ABJECTION AND RESURRECTION IN DOSTOEVSKY’S THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV 1. Introduction: Being in the World At the heart of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Brat´ia Karamazovy, 1880) lies the vexed question of ‘being in the world’. How can rational human beings consent to their existence in a ‘world’ – in both the natural and social senses of the term1 – groaning with unjust and inexplicable suffering? Most famously, Ivan Karamazov qualifies his rebellion by insisting that ‘it’s not that I don’t accept God [. .] it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept’.2 Simultaneously, the central story of his brother Alyosha, the novel’s ostensible ‘hero’, is that of a young monk coming to terms with his mentor’s perplexing order that he leave the monastery: ‘This is not your place for the time. I bless you for great service in the world.’3 Alyosha’s story is a secularisation narrative in one of the original meanings of this term, denoting the lifting of monastic restrictions from a member of the clergy so that he may enter the secular world. Alyosha must leave the monastery and literally go forth ‘to be in the world’ (‘prebyvat´ v miru’).4 However, he must first reconcile 1 As with the English ‘world’, the Russian ‘mir’ and ‘svet’ have both natural and social meanings: the ‘world’ of the physical universe and the ‘world’ of human society. Interestingly, Ivan Karamazov exclusively uses the word ‘mir’ in his rebellious complaint, in which he largely focuses on the cruelty of the human ‘world’, while Dmitri alternates between ‘mir’ and ‘svet’ in his ecstatic praise of the physical or natural ‘world’. 2 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, New York: The Modern Library, 1995, p. 261. 3 Ibid., pp. 80-81. 4 Dostoevskii, Fedor, Brat´ia Karamazovy, Petrozavodsk : Karel´skoe Knizhnoe Izdatel´stvo, 1970, p. 396. ASEES, Vol. 28, Nos. 1-2 (2014): 1-32 STANLEY BILL himself with the reality that ‘being in the world’ fundamentally means being a physi- cal body subject to death and disintegration. Specifically, he must accept the death and unseemly decomposition of Father Zossima. When his beloved mentor passes away, Alyosha falls into a very natural grief. Yet when the elder’s body betrays the first malodorous signs of decay, the young monk experiences an anguish far more tumultuous than ordinary mourning. Indeed, the narrator pointedly interrupts his account to underline the central significance of this scandalous event, which forms ‘a crisis and turning point in [Alyosha’s] spiritual development, giving a shock to his intellect, which finally strengthened it for the rest of his life and gave it a definite aim’.5 The decomposition of Zossima’s body forms the crucial moment in the development of Dostoevsky’s last positive hero. In this arti- cle, I wish to examine how the treatment of this crisis forms part of Dostoevsky’s own broader literary and philosophical response to one of the central issues of Christian theology – the promised resurrection of the individual body in the face of physical decay. Dostoevsky’s final work brings the Christian dogma of individual corporeal resurrection into question, while exposing a painful dilemma within his thought over the relative significance of individual and collective forms of existence. The problem of corporeal vulnerability appears prominently throughout Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, perhaps most strikingly in Ippolit Terentiev’s horrified confron- tation in The Idiot (Idiot, 1869) with Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Ippolit concludes that the sight of Christ’s tortured corpse must have brought even his disciples to waver in their faith: ‘How could they believe, look- ing at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? [. .] If death is so terrible and 5 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 372. 2 FATHER ZOSSIMA’S BODY the laws of nature are so powerful, how can they be overcome?’6