Abstract
Dostoevsky is often regarded as the ultimate heir to both European and Russian Romanticisms, and the genre of the polyphonic novel that he created—as a quintessential expression of literary and philosophical modernism. This chapter argues that in order to fully understand Dostoevsky’s breakthrough one ought to examine his work in the context of both German and Russian aesthetic debates in the 1800s–60s. The crucial role in all these discussions belonged to Friedrich Schiller, whom Dostoevsky on one occasion called “a Russian poet,” whose works “have become flesh and blood of Russian culture.” Schiller’s poetry and dramas offered a lifelong source of poetic inspiration to Dostoevsky. He also knew Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795–96), and tried to apply them in his novelistic experimentations. Focusing in particular on The Brothers Karamazov, this chapter argues that Dostoevsky’s attempt to cast Alyosha as an embodiment of the Schillerian “beautiful soul” capable of reconciling his brothers remains unconvincing. Although in the epilogue Alyosha acts like a teacher in front of a crowd of schoolboys, his Bildung remains incomplete. The denouement of Dmitry’s and Ivan’s stories is likewise deferred. But while this work, which lacks unity of action, resists canonical aesthetic interpretations, it invites Friedrich Schlegel’s approach to the novel as a pluralistic, essentially open genre system, which integrates ancient and modern, “naïve” and “sentimental” literary forms.
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Notes
- 1.
For an in-depth discussion of Ivanov’s theory of tragedy and his interpretation of the Dostoevsky novel as a novel-tragedy see Robert Bird, The Russian Prospero, 144. Bird also discusses Ivanov’s filiations with German Romantic genre theory and his influence on Bakhtin and his circle (144–9).
- 2.
The first influential thinker who saw tragic agon between a hero and his antagonist (or antagonists) as the basis for Dostoevsky’s novelistic plot was Dmitrii Merezhkovsky. See his L. Tolstoy i Dostoevsky. George Steiner examines Dostoevsky as essentially a tragedian who adapted the prose novel to the demands of the tragic agon. See his Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. Among more recent scholars, Ilya Kliger has reopened the debates on Dostoevsky and tragedy in a number of essays. See in particular, “Dostoevsky and the novel-tragedy: Genre and Modernity in Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin.”
- 3.
Joseph Frank discusses Dostoevsky’s reading and his intellectual sympathies in the 1840s in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849. The chapters that are most relevant for the present discussion of Dostoevsky’s Romantic filiations are chap. 8, “The two Romanticisms,” chap. 9, “The Gogol period,” and chaps. 13 and 14, both titled “Belinsky and Dostoevsky.”
- 4.
I discuss Dostoevsky’s involvement in the “native soil” (pochvennichstvo ) movement in chap. 7 of For Humanity’s Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture
- 5.
For a detailed history of Time and its successor, Epoch, see V. Tunimanov.
- 6.
The journals Time and Epoch, officially edited by the writer’s older brother Mikhail Dostoevsky, became the organs of the “native soil” movement. Susan McReynolds and Malcolm Jones offer concise but well-informed accounts of the Schillerian sources of Dostoevsky’s and his collaborators’ vision of an aesthetic education of the Russian nation. For a broader discussion of Dostoevsky’s aesthetics and its German Romantic roots see R.L. Jackson’s book. For a good overview of Dostoevsky’s intertextual debts to Schiller see Alexandra Lyngstad’s book.
- 7.
I discuss Grigor’ev’s evolution and his ideas in chap. 2 of For Humanity’s Sake.
- 8.
Belinsky’s indebtedness to Schiller’s historicist understanding of literary evolution in relation to sociality is obvious throughout his oeuvre. That Belinsky shared Schiller’s idealism is likewise already obvious from his early works, including the seminal essay Literary Dreams (Literaturnye mechtaniia). See Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 1:10–35. See also Belinsky v vospominaniakh sovremeniikov. Helpful Anglophone studies of Belinsky include Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Vissarion Belinsky,” in Russian Thinkers, 150–85, and Vadim Shkol’nikov, “The Crisis of the Beautiful Soul and the Hidden History of Russian Hegelianism,” in Hegel’s Thought in Europe, 17–34.
- 9.
Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 413–503.
- 10.
See KFSA 18:100, no. 857; KFSA 2:182, no. 116.
- 11.
See, for example, Grigor’ev’s cycle of essays “Razvitie idei narrodnosti v russkoi literature so smerti Pushkina,” in Apologia pochvennichstva, 184–608. D. S. Mirsky provides a very crisp gloss on Grigor’ev’s key ideas in his essay “Apollon Grigor’ev,” in A History of Russian Literature, 325–30.
- 12.
Strakhov’s view of Russian literary history as a unique natural and spiritual organism is continuous with his theoretical philosophy, which found a systematic formulation in The World as a Whole, a book much admired by Lev Tolstoy. It was Tolstoy who would eventually become Strakhov’s main hero and friend. The relations between Dostoevsky and Strakhov worsened during their mutual sojourn in Florence in 1869 and never became as good as they had been in 1861–63.
- 13.
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 3:358.
- 14.
Summarizing the opinion of the Silver Age critics, Mochulsky writes: “The youth of the great sinner is ideologically connected with Ivan Karamazov’s youth. The hero of the Life has ‘infinite dreams, that extend to overthrowing God and establishing himself in His place…’ Dostoevsky’s majestic conception The Life of a Great Sinner is the spiritual center of his work: like a subterranean spring, it nourished his great novels of the seventies and the eighties with its waters” (403).
- 15.
“Kann denn ein grosser Sünder noch umkehren? Ein grosser Sünder kann nimmermehr umkehren, das hätte ich längst wissen können.” Die Räuber, 135.
- 16.
The “Gogol period” was a term introduced by M.N. Chernyshevsky in a series of essays published in 1855/1856 and aimed at a reappraisal of Belinsky’s and his contemporaries’ contribution to Russian literature. See Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda.
- 17.
In a letter to Apollon Maikov from December 11, 1869 Dostoevsky wrote: “I have a completely different notion of actuality and realism than our realists and critics. My idealism is more real than theirs. God! If one were to relate meaningfully what we Russians have gone through in the last ten years of our spiritual development, wouldn’t the realists explain it was a fantasy! But that is a fundamental, basic realism. That’s just what realism is, only deeper, while theirs only skims the surface.” The Brothers Karamazov , the Norton Critical Edition, 751. Joseph Fanger’s well-known study elucidates Dostoevsky’s “Romantic realism,” or a “realism in a higher sense” (as he defined his artistic creed on a number of occasions), by comparing his poetics to those of Gogol, Balzac, and Dickens. As my chapter should have made clear, however, Dostoevsky’s attempt to overcome the superficial realism of the midnineteenth-century école réaliste was also a consequence of his immersion in Schiller’s philosophy and art theory.
- 18.
I discuss this debate in “The Bildungsroman in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.” For a more in-depth discussion, see Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave.
- 19.
These ideas are expressed with the greatest cogency in Bakhtin’s essays “Discourse in the Novel” and “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” published in The Dialogic Imagination.
- 20.
In “Letter on the Novel” (“Brief über den Roman”), a part of his Dialogue on Poetry , Schlegel describes the novelistic as a new way of writing that does not abide by the classical distinction between the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic forms. Thus, Ariosto, Cervantes, and Shakespeare can all be seen as examples of the novelistic way of writing. Schlegel goes on to suggest that the novel can accommodate different styles and genre modes. The novel is ultimately no longer a genre in the classical sense of the term, but is synonymous with a “Romantic book” (“ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch”). “Gespräch über die Poesie,” KFSA 2:335.
- 21.
The stage show is depicted in chap. 11 of Part One, 183–206.
- 22.
See Perlina, part two, 59–139. Also Holland, especially chaps. 4 and 5.
- 23.
Polnoe sobranoie sochinenii 25:104–19.
- 24.
All references to the text are to the Norton Critical Edition.
- 25.
See note 14.
- 26.
Letters on the Aesthetic Education, Letter Four, 21.
- 27.
As Tchizhewskij points out, Alyosha, who has spent most of his youth in a monastery, is repeatedly compared to an angel (794, 796).
- 28.
The name comes from the Turkic word “kara” (which means “black”) and the colloquial or regional word “maz’” which can mean “tar” or “dirt.”
- 29.
For the novel as an encyclopedia, see Nassar, 127. Through very careful historical argumentation based on documents and many other circumstantial pieces of evidence Volgin comes to the conclusion that in the last year of his life the writer tried to reconcile representatives of radical intelligentsia, including the terrorists from Land and Liberty, with the state. The projects to make Alyosha a revolutionary reflect the writer’s own dealings with the revolutionaries.
- 30.
For a sophisticated interpretation of Schiller’s play within a broader political context of contemporary Germany and Europe, see Müller-Seidel, 200–11.
- 31.
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 8:66.
- 32.
Tragic suffering and aesthetic education are at the center of Schiller’s essays “On the Sublime” (“Ueber das Erhabene”) and “On Grace and Dignity” (“Ueber Anmut und Würde”), which were written in the wake of Schiller’s discovery of Kant but before Letters on the Aesthetic Education. It is here that the idea of beauty as a sensuous image of freedom emerged. But it was not Kantian freedom as autonomy, but a more Spinozistic freedom, which Beiser calls heautonomy, that Schiller was after in the 1790s. I would add to this that as a playwright Schiller was more successful at portraying characters who attain dignity and a kind of moral beauty through suffering and resignation (such as the Queen in Don Carlos and Maria Stuart) than those whose beauty expresses a harmony of rational will with their nature (heautonomy). See Beiser, 183–225.
- 33.
Anna Berman.
- 34.
I offer a detailed interpretation of this novel in chap. 7 of For Humanity’s Sake.
- 35.
See Perlina, 160.
- 36.
See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of Prophet, 588–703.
- 37.
See Camus, 50–7.
- 38.
Woloch uses Balzac’s Human Comedy as his pivotal example.
- 39.
Holquist and Clark discuss the neo-Kantian roots of Bakhtin’s aesthetics and clarify the meanings of such key terms as vnenakhodimost’ (outsideness ), zavershennost’ (finalizability ), and nezavershennost’ (unfinalizability) in chap. 3, “Architectonics of Answerability,” 79.
- 40.
Bakhtin describes this crisis first and foremost as an axiological crisis that expresses itself through a crisis of style: “The crisis of authorship: the very place of art in the whole of culture, in the event of being, is reevaluated; any traditional place of art seems unjustified, the artist is something determinate // it is impossible to be an artist, it is impossible to become totally part of this limited sphere; the point is not to surpass others in art, but to surpass art itself, the immanent criteria of a given domain of culture are not accepted any longer, nor are the domains of culture as determinate cultural domains. Romanticism and its idea of integral or ‘total’ creation and of ‘total’ man. One strives to act and create directly in the unitary event of being as its sole participant; one is unable to humble oneself to the status of a toiler, unable to determine one’s place in the event of being through others, to place oneself on a par with others.” Art and Answerability, 202–3.
- 41.
A Russian nobleman of German extraction, Stepun was one of the founders of Logos , a bilingual philosophy journal, which appeared simultaneously in Tübingen and Moscow. After the Revolution Stepun was sent into exile on one of the two “philosophical ships” and ended up in Germany, where he continued his career. See Christian Hufen, Fedor Stepun.
- 42.
KFSA 1/2:284–351.
- 43.
In his letters to A.W. Schlegel Friedrich Schlegel repeatedly turned to musical terms and described his collection of fragments as “many voices or instruments harmonizing in music” (KFSA 24:56). See Nassar, 133.
- 44.
Holquist and Clark discuss Bakhtin’s interest in Einstein’s relativity theory, Ukhtomsky’s biological theory, as well as his connections to avant garde artistic movements, such as Kasimir Malevich’s “Suprematism.” See chaps. 2–4 of their book.
- 45.
“Pushkin .” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 26:136–48. The key ideas of this speech are in fact borrowed from Grigor’ev’s “O razvitii idei narodnosti.”
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Steiner, L. (2020). Dostoevsky as a Romantic Novelist. In: Forster, M., Steiner, L. (eds) Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_15
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