Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky is a collection of twenty-one essays with a broad interdisciplinary focus. The abundance of contributions makes it impossible to discuss each paper individually, yet the collection as a whole demonstrates that all the authors provide intertextual interpretations of Dostoevskii. Following the editors’ introduction, the papers are grouped into Five Parts: “Encounters with Science,” “Engagements with Philosophy,” “Questions of Aesthetics,” “The Self and the Other,” and “Intellectual Connections.”
Part One, “Encounters with Science,” provides an overview of the mid-nineteenth-century materialistic, positivistic, and highly reductionist versions of the theory of evolution in the writings of Nikolai Chernyshevskii, V.A. Zaitsev, and their young radical disciples—the Russian Nihilists. Three papers, by David Bethea and Victoria Thorstensson (35–62), Liza Knapp (63–81), and Anna A. Berman (83–95), trace the treatment of Social Darwinism as a “competitive struggle for survival in particular environmental niches” in Chernyshevskii's Anthropological Principle in Philosophy and V.A. Zaitsev's “Natural Science and Justice.” The authors juxtapose this materialistic and positivistic epistemological frame with “Darwin's Plot on the Island of England and on Russian Novelistic Sod” (Knapp's definition of the Dostoevskii narrative, 68–78). Bethea and Thorstensson demonstrate that the positivistic and utilitarian episteme of the Russian Darwinists, devoid of historical, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical intuition, was refuted by Dostoevskii in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Notes from Underground, and Crime and Punishment (37–47).
Another voice in the campaign against Nihilism and utilitarian treatment of art was Mikhail Katkov, a contributor to Notes of the Fatherland in 1839–41, and later a critical observer and editor of the Russian Messenger, where Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, four of Dostoevskii's major works, and several other “anti-Nihilistic” novels were published. In 1861–63, however, Katkov and Dostoevskii approached the “aesthetic relations of art to reality” from different positions. A more conciliatory Katkov gradually succeeded in substituting heuristic dialogues with Dostoevskii for polemics. As Susanne Fusso demonstrates (193–213), Katkov's paper “Otzyv inostrantsa o Pushkine,” published in 1839, served as a “Prelude to a Collaboration” of the opponents and provided a link to their mutually-supportive treatment of Aleksandr Pushkin through the prism of organic criticism and Christian ethics which reached its high point in Dostoevskii's celebration of Pushkin.
In Part Two, David Cunningham, Charles Larmore, and Sergei Kibalnik choose The Brothers Karamazov for their discussions of Dostoevskii's various dialogic encounters. They address, each one from an individual perspective, the isomorphic contexts of Ivan Karamazov's “Pro et Contra” and his “If … then,” and discuss the foundations of his religious/areligious ethics. Having defined the prototypes and subtexts of Ivan's discourse (an article on the place of the Church in the State, “facts” documenting the irredeemable suffering of innocent children, and “The Grand Inquisitor”), they progress in the direction of the “supertexts” which are “beyond and ahead of [Ivan's] intelligence and his faith”(Cunningham, 137). Ivan's declaration: “If there is no God, all things are lawful” originates in the writings of David Strauss, Max Stirner, and “anticipates the next step, taken by Nietzsche, who in The Gay Science, published after Dostoevskii's death, declared that ‘God is dead’” (Kibalnik, 167). Cunningham concurs with Kibalnik. Treating anthropotheism and theo-anthropy in the Possessed and Brothers Karamazov as “writing oneself into or out of Belief,” he demonstrates that Friedrich Nietzsche's Antichrist and Zarathustra are dialogical rejoinders in the discussions initiated by Dostoevskii. Larmore states that Ivan's desire for man's freedom and his striving for justice may “suggest that the same freedom shows itself in a faith in God,” which is “freely given and not based on our various needs” (163). Strangely enough, all three authors fail to notice that Ivan's expression “All things are lawful” (vse dozvoleno) always appears in quotation marks, and is, indeed, a quotation from I Corinthians, 6:12. However, Ivan preserves only the beginning of the phrase, cutting out the Apostle's thrice-repeated “but”: “… but not all things are expedient … but I will not fall under the power of any… but not all things edify,” thus substituting apostasy for St. Paul's (and Zosima's) true meaning.
While Cunningham, Larmore, and Kibalnik treat Ivan's discourse as an organic textual unit in and of itself, Steven Cassedy performs a surgical operation on the textual tissue of Ivan's discourse. From the novel's chapter “The Brothers Get Acquainted” he extracts not even a full-fledged statement, but an interrogative phrase: “To love life more than its meaning?” He claims that in the entire novel no references are given to the “more than its meaning” component. His categorical claim calls forth serious reservations: A.S. Dolinin, N. Perlina, and other scholars have demonstrated that Ivan's entire monologue is a close paraphrase of Aleksandr Herzen's From the Other Shore and Ends and Beginnings. But even if Cassedy finds their textual interpretations not persuasive, his search for the “meaning of meaning” through “Non-Russian Contexts” and “Russian Contexts,” as well as his claim about the disambiguation of “the meaning of life's meaning” (121–28) are unwarranted. The idiom “zhivaia zhizn’” was introduced into Dostoevskii's texts by his Underground Antihero who repeated the phrase three times in the final paragraphs of his confession, hastening to explain the meaning of his neologism, yet as a misanthropic negativist, he had to rely on apophatic constructions. The “Commentary” of the Academy edition to the Notes (V: 197–200; 501–4n) informs us that the idiom “zhivaia zhizn’” was frequently used in Russian literature and journalism and traces the interpretations of its meanings through many Russian and western texts.
Svetlana Evdokimova (Part Three), Vladimir Golstein, Gary Saul Morson, and Yuri Corrigan (Part Four) contributed their papers to different parts of the volume, but the common subject of their studies is the problem of “The Self and Other.” Evdokimova (213–31) treats her subject through the prism of the Simulacrum and distinguishes between the Essence/Appearance and Model/Copy oppositions in Fyodor Karamazov's buffoonery, in Dmitry and Ivan's inability to distinguish between true images and phantasms, and in the premeditated or inadvertent assigning to one person the name and even the life story of another.
Goldstein (291–313) points out the stumbling blocks in Raskolnikov's way towards confessing and acknowledging the true meaning of his crime. An illustration of the Essence/Appearance and Model/Copy oppositions is Porfiry, a detective who, according to the novel's fabula, undertakes the investigation of Raskolnikov's case but, according to the thematic composition of Crime and Punishment, takes upon himself the role of a “Socratic midwife.” The very essence of Porfiry's midwifery efforts is to bring forth Raskolnikov's soul to the light of truth and spiritual rebirth (295–98).
Saul Morson (235–49) chooses for his study “a double” from Dostoevskii's The Double, and raises the question: “How can something that has no physical presence and can contain the universe be somewhere in particular? It's like the mystery of the burning bush—something material, but defying the laws of matter” (236). Indeed, “the double” by essence, is a copy, an appearance, yet in Dostoevskii, a simulacrum (Goliadkin-Jr) usurps, internalizes, and appropriates the essence of the “generative model” and deprives the real Goliadkin of his place in life.
Yuri Corrigan (249–67) discusses the intimate friendship of two young men, Vasia and Arkady, the heroes of “A Weak Heart.” Pointing out “the replacement of aspects of the self with the activities of the other” (253), Corrigan traces conflicting relations between the Essence (damaged self-sufficiency in Vasia's “I”) and the Simulacrum (Arkady's overprotective attachment to his friend). The tragic finale makes one think of The Double: having lost their place in life, Vasia and Goliadkin are delivered to the same Petersburg “Priazhka” asylum.
Donna Orwin's “Achilles in Crime and Punishment” and Olga Meerson's “Raskolnikov and the Aqedah (Isaac's Binding)” from Part Five are the most valuable contributions to the entire collection. Orwin finds in Homer's Iliad the highest manifestations of tragic realism and symbolism in Crime and Punishment. She analyses two critical turning points of the plot: (1) Svidrigailov committing suicide on the shore of the Little Neva River under the eyes of a Jewish watchman with “a copper Achilles helmet on his head,” and (2) the scene from the Epilogue, in which Raskolnikov, still an unrepentant convict, gazes across a wide Siberian river and sees its pastoral landscape as “the age of Abraham and his flocks.” By analogy to the towering rage of Achilles in the Iliad, Raskolnikov “is caught between the rage and offended honor of an Achilles and the humility of a Sonya” (374), and the Siberian landscape of “the age of Abraham and his flocks” is an analogue to the dwelling place of the Olympian gods.
Olga Meerson addresses the same episodes for her seminal study of intertextual connections: the novel's Epilogue and Gen. 22:1–19 (“Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaac” in Christian, and “Isaac's Binding” in Judaic tradition). She defines the basic characteristics of Dostoevskii's eschatological poetics and addressing Raskolnikov's existential situation, resolves the problem of the unrepentant protagonist who “all of a sudden” becomes redeemed and aware of being resurrected.” For Dostoevskii, Meerson states, the only way to break down the dialectics of the intellectual Raskolnikov is to “introduce into the novel the subtext from the world of the Bible and of the events described” and “to make the hero and the readers of the novel recognize the experience of repentance as such” (390).
Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky is a valuable addition to the series of publications and conference proceedings: Dostoevsky and World Culture, The Twenty-First Century through Dostoevsky's Eyes: The Prospect for Humanity (2002).
