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The Strange Relationship of Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich as Told by Anton Lavrent'evich G-v

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Craig Cravens
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Extract

The first-person narrative form is notoriously problematic. Throughout the history of the novel, it has both repelled authors due to the obvious limitations imposed by its restriction to a single consciousness and attracted them because of the apparent veracity it imparts to psychological portrayal. In the most conscientiously constructed examples of the type, the first-person narrator is able to portray directly the thoughts of a single character only, that is, himself. Of other characters, he can only report actions and surmise motives, and these characters to whom the reader does not have cognitive privilege may appear to be two-dimensional or even come off as caricatures.

Fedor Dostoevskii's Besy (Demons, 1871-72) is a first-person memoir novel. My thesis is that the novel's narrative form itself involves the reader psychologically and morally in problems that occupied Dostoevskii throughout his life—problems of freedom, contingency, and eternity.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , Winter 2000 , pp. 782 - 801
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

1. For this reason, George Orwell rejects the form outright, “But in general an T novel is simply the story of one person—a three-dimensional figure among caricatures— & therefore cannot be a true novel.” Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4:512 Google Scholar

2. See Hamburger, Kate, The Logic of Literature, trans. Rose, Marilynn (Bloomington, 1973), 325 Google Scholar.

3. These two terms were coined by Leo Spitzer in “Zum Stil Marcel Proust's,” Stilstudien, 2 vols. (Munich, 1928), 2:478. Berul Romberg, Franz Stanzel, and Dorrit Cohn expand on Spitzer's original work. See Romberg, Bertil, Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel (Stockholm, 1962)Google Scholar; Stanzel, Franz, Narrative Situations in the Novel, trans. Pusack, James (Bloomington, 1971)Google Scholar; Stanzel, , A Theory of Narrative, trans. Goedsche, Charlotte (Cambridge, Eng., 1984)Google Scholar; and Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar.

4. Gene Fitzgerald, Malcolm Jones, and Adam Weiner likewise distinguish G-v's narrating and experiencing selves, and Jones argues for not one but two narrating selves and two experiencing selves. See Fitzgerald, Gene, “Anton Lavrent'evich G-v: The Narrator as Re-Creator in Dostoevskyij's The Possessed ,” in Gutsche, G.J. and Leighton, L., eds., New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose (Columbus, 1982), 121-34Google Scholar; Malcolm Jones, 'The Narrator and Narrative Technique of Dostoevsky's TheDevils,” in W.J. Leatherbarrow, ed., Dostoevsky's The Devils: A Critical Companion (Evanston, 1999), 100-118; and Weiner, Adam, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia from Gogol to Nabokov (Evanston, 1998)Google Scholar. Weiner refers to the two narrative entities as “the two hypostases of G-v,” the character and the narrator (116).

5. Zundelovich is typical: ‘The novel's varying styles—evidence of a flawed design— manifest themselves primarily in the fact that the author and the chronicler have no fixed boundaries, so that the narration switches from the chronicler's to the author's frequently and unexpectedly. Thus, the chronicler appears to have several faces or masks. It is precisely because in Besy there is no clear division [between author and narrator] that the novel falls into two parts of unequal value (two spheres of pamphleteering).” See Zundelovich, la. O., “Pamfletnyi stroi romana Besy,” Romany Dostoevskogo: Stat'i (Tashkent, 1963), 109-10Google Scholar; Jones, Malcolm V., Dostoyevsky: The Novel of Discord (London, 1976), 147 Google Scholar; Matlaw, Ralph, ‘The Chronicler of The Possessed: Character and Function,” Dostoevsky Studies 5 (1984): 37–47 Google Scholar; and Gus, Mikhail, Idei i obrazyF. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1971), 396–408 Google Scholar.

6. This is not the first study of the novel to assume that the narrator is a unified consciousness. See the following works: Fitzgerald, “Anton Lavrent'evich G-v“; Jones, The Narrator and Narrative Technique of Dostoevsky's The Devils“; and V. A. Tunimanov, ‘The Narrator in The Devils,” in Jackson, Robert Louis, ed., Dostoevsky: New Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1984), 145-75Google Scholar. Jones provides a detailed physical and psychological portrait of Anton Lavrent'evich G-v (100-102).

7. Wayne Booth makes the useful distinction between the author and the implied author in his classic study of narrative: ‘The implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life.” See Booth, , The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1983), 73–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972-1990), 10:8–9 Google Scholar. All translations are my own.

9. Dostoevskii's description of Prince Myshkin in a letter to Sofiia Ivanovna, January 1868.

10. Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11:119 Google Scholar.

11. For readings of G-v's chronicle as derived from the “Holy Russian Chronicle,” see Murav, Harriet, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stan gosford, 1992)Google Scholar; Likhachev, Dmitrii, “Letopisnoe vremia u Dostoevskogo,” Poetika drevnorusskoi literatury, 2d ed. (Leningrad, 1971), 347-63Google Scholar; and Weiner, By Authors Possessed.

12. Dostoevskii, , Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 10:88 Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 10:166.

14. Ibid., 11:261. Emphasis in the original.

15. See Stanzel, Franz, “Innenwelt: Ein Darstellungsproblem des englischen Romans,“ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 12, no. 3 (July 1962): 273-86Google Scholar.

16. To display his own past psyche, the first-person narrator, of course, may employ all three methods without transgressing the bounds of the first-person form.

17. Dostoevskii, , Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 10:35 Google Scholar.

18. Ibid., 10:347.

19. Ibid., 10:123.

20. Ibid., 11:92. In her structuralist study, Slobodanka Vladiv has listed all of these sam drug scenes, that is, one-on-one conversations in which G-v is absent. See Vladiv, Slobodanka, Narrative Principles in Dostoevski's Besy: A Structural Analysis (Berne, 1979), 170-72Google Scholar.

21. Dostoevskii, , Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 10:173 Google Scholar.

22. See Morson, Gary Saul, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadoxos of Time (New Haven, 1994), 117-72Google Scholar. Frank Kermode hints at a similar phenomenon that he calls a “surplus of sense … little breaches of the idiom of simple narration” that are never explained in the narrative itself but leave a lingering mysterious aura that indicates a larger existence beyond the text. See Kermode, Frank, The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 13–23 Google Scholar.

23. See Hamburger, , Logic of Literature, 70–71 Google Scholar.

24. Dostoevskii, , Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 10:322 Google Scholar.

25. Belknap, Robert L., The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov (Evanston, 1989), 78 Google ScholarPubMed.

26. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis, 1984), 225 Google Scholar.

27. Even Maria Shatova at the end—she incarnates this betrayal in simple, trashy, seductive terms.

28. Dostoevskii, , Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 11:21 Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 10:188.

30. Ibid., 10:189.

31. Ibid., 10:195.

32. Ibid., 10:196.

33. Ibid., 10:198.

34. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin, 1981), 286 Google Scholar.

35. Bakhtin, , Problems of Dosloevsky's Poetics, 29.Google Scholar

36. Robbe-Grillet, Alain, Pourun nouveau roman (Paris, 1963), 133 Google Scholar.

37. Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 25:118—19 Google Scholar.

38. Ibid., 10:480.

39. Ibid., 10:481.

40. Ibid., 10:494.

41. Ibid., 10:195.

42. Michael Holquist has observed that at the end of Crime and Punishment the detective story gives way to the wisdom tale. The last pages of the novel, he writes, are told in a different kind of time: “The ‘correct’ answer is not a solution, but the reminder of another and greater mystery.” See Holquist, Michael, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton, 1977), 101 Google Scholar.

43. Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:415 Google Scholar.

44. Ibid., 10:176.

45. Ibid., 10:394. Gene Moore hints at G-v's demonism. See Moore, , “The Voices of Legion: The Narrator of The Possessed ,” Dostoevsky Studies 6 (1985): 51–66 Google Scholar. Weiner and Vladimir Padunov diabolize G-v to an extreme. Wiener, By Authors Possessed, and Vladimir Padunov, “Dostoevsky's ‘Devils': A Polemical Aesthetics” (manuscript under consideration).

46. Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 21:129 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.