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Time-spaces (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)
The Tolstoy/Dostoevsky parallel lives can also help us grasp the organization and value-hierarchies of their respective literary worlds. Very early, during Tolstoy’s lifetime, readers sensed that these two worlds were incompatible. In 1902, the Symbolist poet and critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky published a lengthy comparative study in which he called Dostoevsky a “seer of the spirit” (a poet of faith and mystic revelation) and Tolstoy a “seer of the flesh” (a singer of corporeality and unclouded vision). In 1929, in what proved to be another tenacious opposition, Mikhail Bakhtin defined Dostoevsky as “dialogic” or polyphonic (character-centered) and Tolstoy as “monologic” (author-centered).11 The dialogic writer emphasizes horizontal relations and dispersed, centrifugal, competitive points of view; the monologist, in contrast, stresses the vertical, the centripetal, the absolute. Since there is some measure of truth to these broad binary generalizations as they relate to our two novelists, we expand on them here.
Dostoevsky’s most memorable heroes are depicted in an unstable or borderline phase of their lives. This brief slice of their life is under great pressure. The heroes are being tested at an extreme “threshold” moment; one can almost see the outline of the scaffold behind them, that moment in late December 1849 when Dostoevsky, at age twenty-eight, was led out by drumroll to the Semyonovsky parade ground already dressed in his shroud. We meet Raskol-nikov on the brink of committing a murder. Myshkin is in a pre-epileptic state for much of The Idiot. Three of the (perhaps) four Karamazov brothers are at their father’s throat from the first family reunion in the monastery up to (and beyond) the parricide. Most Dostoevskian heroines live on the brink of hysteria. The Underground Man is liminal in a more metaphysical sense: he never gets off the threshold – eventually an editor must cut him off – because he refuses to let any definitions of himself coalesce. Such contrariness, he thinks, guarantees his freedom. This high energy under maximum pressure can erupt at any moment into tragedy or comedy, for Dostoevsky, like Gogol, is an irrepressibly comic writer. Significantly, in a routine Dostoevskian scene this energy tends to build and then to erupt. It does not leak out slowly or fuel its characters with a steady, stabilizing flame.
Dostoevsky favors built-up, congested environments: a prison barracks, a tenement building, houses strung out along a street. Spatial thresholds – windows, door-jams, corridors, fences, stairways, and landings – are prominent in this architecture. The plot leaps forward at moments of tense eye-to-eye contact over a threshold, as when Raskolnikov, in a panic, commits two murders just inside the door, or when the jealous Rogozhin pulls a knife on Prince Myshkin,
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the Idiot, at the top of the stairs. For Dostoevsky, truths are released in crisis time. In the calmer, more coherent and linear time-space of the criminal trial, such as the lengthy legal procedure during which Dmitry Karamazov is found guilty of parricide, truths are bungled or lost. At the end of The Double, Golyad-kin is committed to a madhouse by the very double he has himself conjured up as his successful fantasy self. Before this ghastly final stop, Golyadkin’s look-alike toady delivers him to his doctor’s house, where suddenly a high-ranking dignitary appears in an armchair at the top of the landing. “The front door opened with a crash . . . Sick with horror, he looked back. The whole of the brightly-lit staircase was thick with people. Inquisitive eyes were watching him from all sides. . . . Our hero gave a scream, and clutched his head. Alas! He had felt this coming for a long time!”12 The passage of time merely reveals what was always true.
Around the edges of a Dostoevskian townscape, nature can be oppressive. Petersburg is a city of dirty slush, rain, unbearable heat, but its weather is always symbolically marked. Nature can also seem magical, as it does to the Dreamer wanderingthe streetsduring WhiteNights,orin theimageof “sticky greenleaves in the spring” that intoxicate Ivan Karamazov. Dostoevsky can mesmerize with glimpses of the natural or non-urban world. The placid Siberian steppe as seen from Raskolnikov’s hard-labor camp in the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment is one such moment, preparing us for the hero’s rebirth; other moments are nostalgic, such as the utopian vision of a Garden in the “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1876). But these spaces are always only glimpsed. The hero or heroine cannot enter them in a practical way or work in them. They are either transitory or hopelessly lost in time, either past or future. Nature does not exist on its own, under the open sky.
In Dostoevsky’s typically explosive, “built” environment, natural and biological cycles are muted. Over time, families tend to break down. Except for the occasional unsatisfying snack in a pub, discussion over cognac, or scandal at a funeral feast, Dostoevsky’s characters do not sit down to regular meals, nor do they sleep normal hours, go out to work, or observe fixed schedules. If a child is born, it dies within hours or weeks. Men and women often rush, but to nowhere in particular, simply beyond the boundaries of the story. This abruptness and disorder is only partly explained by poverty. Energy is not spent on maintenance or on routine material things. (In The Idiot, the robust lunches of cheese, honey, and cutlets enjoyed by the three “tall, blooming, sturdy” daughters of General Epanchin, who “took no pains to conceal their appetites” and were in no hurry to get married (Part I, ch. 4), are comically presented – a tribute to Gogol in Dostoevsky’s world.) Crisis events give rise to a huge amount of talk, but never small talk; all parties are well read, intellectually curious,
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articulate even when drunk, and keen to debate topics in ethical philosophy. The pace can be frenetic – these huge novels are short on clock time, lasting from a few days to a few months – but there is always time to tell one more story.
Dostoevsky’s novels are immediate, talking texts: how something is told, and by whom, are key. As with Gogol, one senses a narrator who, out of ineptitude, caprice, or malice, can willingly distort or withhold the story. This is not the playfulness of Pushkin’s digressions and plot-suspensions in the Belkin Tales, which are simply and honorably erotic (designed to prolong pleasure), nor is it Gogol’s focus on humiliation and embarrassment. In Dostoevsky there is a darker envelope: a keen knowledge of the criminal mind, with its pride that combines boastfulness, indifference to repentance, acceptance of one’s sinfulness, and taboo. Lying and liars are everywhere very important.13 Many of Dostoevsky’s exuberant concealments mix buffoonery with more than a little meanness, for his narrators want to be storytellers themselves and know the power it brings. A narrator can begin embodied, as a neighbor or onlooker reporting (unreliably) on what he sees or hears, and then fade out or evolve into something else as soon as the reader’s trust has been won.14 We find ourselves thrown into a world of ideas and rumors that demands our direct participation and judgment, since information is not being filtered through a single omniscient consciousness.
This is Bakhtin’s main point about Dostoevsky as novelist. Dostoevsky endows his heroes – including his negative ones – with so much independence, mobility of perspective, uncertainty of motive, and potent storytelling skill that readers, wishing to know what is going on, bypass the author/narrator and respond directly to the heroes. This ability to sustain the illusion of autonomous consciousnesses inside a fictional world both qualifies that fiction as “Realism” (for it replicates the way real people live, each on their own, into an open future) and represents an ideal far beyond the ambitions of most “Realistic” authors. For the autonomy of fictive characters is an illusion. Their lines are fixed; they were created toward an end. Dostoevsky, a teacher and a prophet no less than Tolstoy, had a point of view on the world and a passionate value system that he desired us to take seriously. He wanted us to admire the meekness and loyalty of Sonya Marmeladova and despise that calculating blackmailer, vulgar capitalist and poshlyak, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin. He wanted us to reject the Grand Inquisitor’s rationale for a paternalistic socialism based on “miracle, mystery, and authority” and embrace instead the free inequality promised by Christ and spelled out in the teachings of the elder Zosima. Dostoevsky was no relativist. But he was a radical pluralist and personalist, fastidious in presenting the fullest possible case for every option directly out of the mouth of the protagonist who believes in it.
