The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

134 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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,