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Dialogic Poetics: Doktor Zhivago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David K. Danow
David K. Danow*
Affiliation:
Department of Literatures and Languages, University of California, Riverside
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Extract

The structure of Doktor Zhivago is in many respects unique. Its concluding chapter is a collection of poems ostensibly composed by the novel’s central figure. The preceding sixteen prose chapters are themselves further divided into numerous individual scenes, focused on a predominant image, that may be likened to separate cinematic shots. In this respect, the novel lends itself to discussion of the relations between narrative and cinematic technique. It also seeks a certain reconciliation between specific incidents documented in prose and then later reformulated as poetry, affording a sense of “dialogue” between the two classic modes of expression. The purpose of this essay, however, will be to consider dialogue primarily in its concrete sense, rather than range across an entire figurative spectrum, to which the term or its derivatives seem, in recent usage, naturally to gravitate. Metaphoric interpretation, nevertheless, will also find its place here in response to the poetic qualities of the work itself. In broad outline, the intent of this study will be to concentrate upon a specific complex aspect of the novel, its dialogic structures, and attempt to demonstrate that, within this singular work, they are worthy of attention as principal features accounting for its singularity.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 954 - 964
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

1. All page references to the novel are to Doktor Zhivago, Pasternak, Boris (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

2. Distinctions among these three forms of reported speech are discussed in valuable outline by Voloshinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I. R. (New York: Academic Press, 1973), 141–159 Google Scholar.

From among these, most challenging to the reader is the following: “Quasi-direct speech involves discourse that is formally authorial, but that belongs in its ‘emotional structure’ to a represented character, whose inner speech is transmitted and regulated by the author.” Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. McGee, Vern W., ed. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 130 n. 15 Google Scholar (editor’s note).

3. The Word and Verbal Art; Selected Essays by Jan Mukařovský, trans, and ed. Burbank, John and Steiner, Peter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 81 Google Scholar. The article was originally published in 1940.

4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 117.

5. The Prague School distinguishes (in its 1929 theses) between “alternately interrupted (dialogic) speech and unilaterally uninterrupted (monologic) speech.” The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1926-1946, ed. Steiner, Peter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 12 Google Scholar.

6. Veltruský, Jiří, “Semiotic Notes on Dialogue in Literature” in Language and Literary Theory, ed. Stolz, Benjamin A., Titunik, I. R., and Dolezel, Lubomir, Papers in Slavic Philology, no. 5 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 599 Google Scholar.

7. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 71, 72.

8. Ibid., 117.

9. Veltruský, “Semiotic Notes,” 599.

10. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 89 n.i.

11. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics; Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 112.

13. Ibid., 119.

14. As a tangential observation, Zhivago’s expressed sentiment is remarkably close to Bakhtin’s gripping pronouncement: “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival” (ibid., 170).

15. Quasi-direct speech, as Bakhtin explains, is “generally one of the most widespread forms for transmitting inner speech in the novel.” The Dialogic Imagination; Four Essays by Bakhtin, M. M., trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 319 Google Scholar.

16. Peirce, C. S., The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols.; vol. IV, ed. Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933)Google Scholar, point 4.6.

17. As a kind of poetics in a minor key, providing a certain justification for such “fallacy,” the reader is informed at one dramatic moment: “Chto-to skhodnoe tvorilos’ v nravstvennom mire i v fizicheskom” (p. 196).

18. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 124, 125.