Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy By Chloe Susan Liebmann Kitzinger 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 Dorothy J. Hale Spring 2016 Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy © 2016 By Chloe Susan Liebmann Kitzinger Abstract Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy by Chloe Susan Liebmann Kitzinger Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Irina Paperno, Chair This dissertation focuses new critical attention on a problem central to the history and theory of the novel, but so far remarkably underexplored: the mimetic illusion that realist characters exist independently from the author’s control, and even from the constraints of form itself. How is this illusion of “life” produced? What conditions maintain it, and at what points does it start to falter? My study investigates the character-systems of three Russian realist novels with widely differing narrative structures — Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1869), and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) — that offer rich ground for exploring the sources and limits of mimetic illusion. I suggest, moreover, that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky themselves were preoccupied with this question. Their novels take shape around ambitious projects of characterization that carry them toward the edges of the realist tradition, where the novel begins to give way to other forms of art and thought. Reaching beyond the sway of the illusions their novels cast, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky thus each raise questions about where that illusion comes from and how far it extends. My analyses trace the fault lines within techniques that at once intensify the impression of a populated, self-contained fictional world, and push readers past its formal and generic bounds. Chapter One deals with techniques of mimetic characterization rooted in the stable omniscient narrative of Tolstoy’s major novels, and in particular War and Peace. I survey the narrative devices cultivating the illusion that the characters of War and Peace live independently of device, dependent on persistent contrasts throughout the novel’s system of named characters. An unconventional problem taxes this system past its limits: how to represent the lives of the crowds of unnamed figures tangential to the narrative, but ever more central to Tolstoy’s conception of his mimetic project. I suggest that War and Peace’s notorious digressions are an attempt, in part, to work out a logic of representation beyond the novelistic character-system. Chapters Two and Three consider Dostoevsky’s techniques of characterization, cut off from the dual anchor of Tolstoy’s: the social order of “landowner literature,” and the narrative and mimetic order of omniscience. The Adolescent illustrates the formal chaos this condition creates, suggesting the fullness of its characters’ lives just by the degree to which the language of its illegitimate, incompetent narrator-hero appears to screen them. In The Brothers Karamazov, destabilizing methods of characterization invite a kind of transcendence. Each Karamazov, left to 1 negotiate his “own” fluid position in relation to a family identity, opens a site for a redemptive narrative of religious experience for which the secular forms of the nineteenth century Anglo- European novel must be reworked. But the mythical sweep of this narrative is threatened by the textbound character-system that structures the Karamazovs’ plot. Like Tolstoy’s, Dostoevsky’s late novels thus evidence a distrust of the limitations of novel form and mimetic character, balanced only precariously with techniques that fit the novel genre for a new kind of story. Chapter Four examines the place of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s characters in the seminal novel theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács. I argue that both theorists inherited a paradox from the novels they analyze. The “living” novelistic character bears moral, political, and social significance for Lukács and Bakhtin (as for the theory of the novel that developed in their wake). But read closely, their theories consistently link that effect of “life” with attributes of the novel as a self-sufficient and self-contained aesthetic form. Bakhtin and Lukács thus open rather than resolve the tension this dissertation explores, between the compellingly constructed illusion of a character’s independent “life,” and the dream — written into Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels themselves — of making that illusion into a path leading out from the fictional text. Exploring the lifelike quality of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s characters as a product of language and aesthetic experience, I aim to illuminate more fully the inviting but uncertain passage between the realist novel and its readers’ world. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................................iii Introduction 1. Illusion and instrument: A paradox of reading mimetic character ........................................ 1 2. Mimesis and the Russian realist novel ................................................................................... 7 3. Russian transformations of European character-systems ...................................................... 14 4. Problems of mimetic characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ....................................... 20 5. Levin’s vault .......................................................................................................................... 25 Section I: Tolstoy Chapter One — “There, that’s me!”: The Discontent of Character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace 1. Approaching the character-system of War And Peace: Dinner at the English Club ............... 28 2. Unfolding the character-system of War And Peace: Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s salon ............ 34 3. Intensifying the illusion: Major protagonists and mimetic life ................................................ 43 4. Solidifying the illusion: Family-names and the distribution of mimetic life ........................... 54 5. Fragmenting the illusion: Minor characters and mimetic life .................................................. 60 6. Expanding the illusion: Marginal characters and mimetic life ................................................ 72 7. “Two, two!”: The discontent of character in War and Peace .................................................. 85 Section II: Dostoevsky Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 89 Chapter Two — Arkady’s Overcoat: Character and the Conditions of Envy in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 96 1. “Forgive me for having cut short my life’s debut!”: The chaos of The Adolescent’s character-system .................................................................................................................... 99 2. “I have, my dear, one favorite Russian writer”: The envy of The Adolescent’s characters ... 108 Chapter Three — “Not you”: Character and the Conditions of Transcendence in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov 1. “From the author”: Narrator and hero in The Brothers Karamazov ........................................ 117 2. “Your whole Karamazov question”: The character-system of The Brothers Karamazov ....... 119 3. “all his life, Fyodor Pavlovich was fond of play-acting”: The Karamazov family and karamazovshchina ........................................................................................................................ 127 4. “You, Alyoshka, are the quiet type. .”: Alyosha as Karamazov ............................................ 131 5. “a scoundrel, but not a thief, not a thief, anything you like, but not a thief” — “It was not you who killed father”: Mitya as not-thief and Ivan as not-murderer .......................................... 139 6. “I am [the] murderer, not Karamazov”: Smerdyakov as not-Karamazov ............................... 151 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 159 i Section III: Novel Theory Chapter Four — Lives in Theory: Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s Characters in Bakhtin and Lukács Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 162 1. Voice and image: Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s characters in early Bakhtin ............................ 166 2. Problems of reflection: Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s characters in later Lukács ..................... 182 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 197 Coda ................................................................................................................................................... 200 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................................