The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

136 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.