REVIEWS

Richard Chapple. A Dostoevsky Dictionary, Ann Arbors Ardis, 1983. 511 pp. Cloth, $ 35. 00; paper, $ 10. 00.

Chapple's Dictionary, with all entries in English, lists characters and various quotations and allusions (literary, historical, biblical, classical) in alphabetical order for each of Dostoevsky's thirty-one major literary works. Following these listings is a comprehensive index. This format is a logically good one and should prove useful to student and scholar alike, as the author hopes.

The back cover of the paperback edition claims Chapple's work to be "the first dictionary in any language to identify every character in Dostoevsky's fiction. " However, Charles Passage's Character Names in Dostoevsky'sFiction, published one year earlier (also by Ardis!) is doubtless the first such dictionary. * Moreover, Passage is superior to Chapple in that he discusses the implied meanings or significance of both given names and surnames. Chapple rarely does this, not even commenting, for instance, on the symbolism in such obvious names as Myshkin or Svetlova. I note, too, that Passage even has a supplementary page on settings, discussing St. Petersburg, Skvoreshniki, Skotoprigonevsk, etc. But Chapple mentions none of these places; in general, his geographical references are scanty. (Chapple is at his best with literary and biblical references, and here he is genuinely instructive, at least so far as this reviewer is concerned. ) Finally, and most serious, Chapple fails to indicate pronunciation of names, while Passage provides accents for every name. Ardis should have suggested a collaboration between these two lexicographers. Such mutual assistance would also have served Chapple an unfortunate spelling errors he has "Agrafyona" rather than "Agrafena" for Grushen'ka's formal given name. An excellent reference work for Russian given names, incidentally is N. A. Petrovskij, Slovar' russkikh lichnykh imen (M: Sovetskaja enciklopedija, 1966).

Ardis makes the additional claim on Chapple's back cover that this reference work enables the reader to find out "exactly where (each of Dostoevsky's characters) appears

* Cf. also Valeriu Cristea, Dictionarul personajelor lui Dostoievski. Bucharest; Editura Cartea Romaneasca, 1983. 501pp. Lei 56; M. S. Altman Dostoevskij po vekham imen. Saratov: Izd. Saratogo univ-ta, 1975. 280 pp. 1 r 1O k. (Editor)

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in a given work or works... " If this claim were true, Chapple's dictionary would be indispensable. But Chapple, though stating in his brief preface (of but 175 words) that this book is based on the Polnoe sobranie sochinenij, never once gives even the chapter number(s), let alone the page number(s), where a given character might be found. Furthermore, he does not indicate even the approximate locations of the numerous quotations that he cites, most of which appear only once in a given work. It may be that the scholar will find most of them, as the context is usually indicated clearly enough, but he may still have to scan fifty pages. The student, though, is not likely to recognize the context that the scholar sees clearly. For instance, what chance will the student have of locating the references to Joseph alluded to in the following entry (quoted here complete)?

JOSEPH (IOSIF). The eleventh son of JACOB, who lived approximately 1770-1660 B. C. His story as recorded in Genesis 37-50 in the OLD TESTAMENT relates his being sold into Egypt as a slave by his jealous brothers, his rising to the stature of prime minister of Egypt under Pharaoh, and his ultimate reunion with his father and brothers during a great famine. ZOSIMA praises the effect of the scriptures upon the Orthodox heart and cites several examples from the life of JOSEPH.

What the above observations indicate is that A Dostoevsky Dictionary will give you information about a particular name or reference that is before you in a given work by Dostoevsky, but it will not help you locate a character or reference that you recall incompletely. Yet even here there may be a problem, for Chapple alphabetizes all quotations, even the longest, only by the first letter of the first word, even if that word be no more interesting than "and. " Seven long quotations appear in the comprehensive index only under that word. For example: "And the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant to us!" Yet neither at "smoke, " "fatherland, " "sweet, " nor "pleasant" is there a cross entry. A person vaguely remembering that Dostoevsky had once quoted this famous line from Gore ot uma, would not have a snowball's chance in hell of learning via Chapple's Dictionary where the citation had appeared. I merely happened on it while browsing in the "Polzunkov" section—and was interested to learn that the lines originated not with Griboedov but Derzhavin, in his poem "Arfa, " 1798.

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Chapple's eccentric, literal-minded alphabetizing is pervasive. Another example: "Cup of gall and vinegar" appears only at "cup, " with no cross references to the key words. And even more strange, Chapple gives one entry as "Fell upon the fountains of waters and they became bitter"—thus leaving out altogether the key word "star" (mentioned by Ivan in his preamble to "The Grand Inquisitor"). As it is, the only entry word is "fell. "

Incidentally, Chapple always gives the original Russian within brackets after the English entry. This is certainly helpful—but he fails to include these words in the comprehensive index, which means that those recalling only the approximate Russian phrasing of a given passage will be all but stymied. For instance, someone remembering the original, "I dym otechestva..., " are much less likely to look for it in translation under "and" than "even"—provided they get that far after giving up on the key words. Also, placing in the index the Russian titles of such periodicals as Otechestvennye zapiski would seem to me essential. Chapple translates this title as Fatherland Notes and lists it only at "Fatherland. " But I could find no translator of Dostoevsky who ever used Chapple's version of this title. That is, in their translations of Zapiski iz podpol'ja, Matlaw uses Annals of the Fatherland; Magarshack, Homeland notes; McAndrew, National Journal; and Garnett, Otechestvennye zapiski; while in Uncle's Dream and a Friend of the Family (Selo Stepanchikovo), Garnett uses Notes of the Fatherland. Few if any students could get to Chapple's entry from these translations. (Incidentally, Chapple does not list translated titles, such as a Friend of the Family—he makes an exception only for The Possessed— that depart significantly from the original. )

Contradicting his usage for Russian titles, Chapple indexes Renan's Vie de Jesus only at the foreign word "Vie. " Why this inconsistency? This is Chapple's common practice for all foreign (non-English, non-Russian) titles. In general, the comprehensive index should list the Russian and the English versions, as well as all key words, for all entries. Since the 36-page index consists at least 8O percent of names, I doubt that the suggested additions would increase the length by more than ten or twelve pages. There is a false economy here. Furthermore, such added pages could be offset by eliminating repetition in the main text. The initial sentences of dozens of entries such as "Pushkin, " "Gogol, "

"Belinsky, " are repeated over and over as they come up

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in one story after another; for Pushkin this occurs ten times. Perhaps it would be best to list major figures of this sort in an initial section, to which the reader could be referred for background information.

Finally, as already implied, there is a problem with translation. I am not talking about errors particularly, though I found a few. I will mention just one: "Oh, you attic, my attic" ("Akh, vy seni, moi seni"). This is a song relating to Grushen'ka, end of Book 8. The fact that Chapple stopped in his Russian dictionary not at seni, 'hall, ' but at sennik, and chose to render its old meaning of 'hayloft' as 'attic' is no great crime and certainly forgivable. The point, though, is, why was he not copying out the words "Ah, my hall, my hall!" from page 416 of the Garnett-Matlaw translation of The Brothers Karamazov (Norton Critical Edition)?

Every English entry in Chapple's dictionary should be taken directly from the best and/or most popular translation available for each work. (Also, each English entry should be quoted essentially in full before being corrected for errors. ) I checked several of Chapple's entries for The Brothers Karamazov against the Garnett- Matlaw translation and always found differences. Why did Chapple go to so much extra effort when it only makes his book more difficult for students to use? In this he should have followed Victor Terras, whose Karamazov Companion (University of Wisconsin, 1981), forthrightly gives page and line references to both the Polnoe sobranie sochinenij and the Garnett-Matlaw edition. It would have been profitable to be able to use Chapple and Terras together, but this is now virtually impossible. One wonders what principle Chapple followed in deciding upon his translations. It would have been the perfect thing for him to discuss in his much too brief preface.

In much of this Chapple is not to blame. He needed a good editor, but never found one. At least he did an excellent job of proofreading. I spotted no more than two or three typos and only one incorrect page reference (off by one page) in the index. And despite all I have said against it, Chapple's Dostoevsky Dictionary will be generally serviceable in its main function of providing immediate information to those with a Dostoevsky text open in front of them.
 

Donald M. Fiene

University of Tennessee

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Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Karamazov Brothers: A Novel in Four Parts with an Epilogue. 2 vols. Translated by Julius Katzer. Illustrated by Vladimir Minayev. With an "Afterword" by Yuri Seleznev. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980. Vol. 1, 493 pp.; Vol. 2, 680 pp. Available from Ardis. $ 15. 95.

I was unaware of this new translation of Brat'ja Karamazovy until I saw it listed in a recent Ardis catalogue. Its title was given incorrectly, of course. Indeed, it is unimaginable that any new English version of Dostoevsky's great novel would alter the title that has stood firm as a rock for a century. But no—here we have The Karamazov Brothers. Conceivably, this new text was meant as a bid to replace the virtually standard English translation by Garnett/Matlaw in the Norton Critical Edition. If so, it does not succeed.

I did not read this translation straight through, but instead perused it at random while looking up my favorite passages. I have chosen a representative sampling of the latter, together with one or two more or less ordinary passages. In quoting these below, I give first the version by Katzer, then the original Russian (Polnoe sobranie sochinenij, vols. 14 and 15), and finally the Garnett/Matlaw version.

"I have a longing to live on, and I'm doing so, even in the teeth of logic. I may not believe in the order of things, yet the sticky young leaves that unfold in the spring are dear to me, as is the blue sky; I hold some people dear, whom—can you believe it?—one loves without knowing why... " (1; 350)—Жить хочется, и я живу, хотя и вопреки логике. Пусть я не верю в порядок вещей, но дороги мне клейкие, распускающиеся весной листочки, дорого голубое небо, дорог иной человек, которого иной раз, поверишь ли, не знаешь за что и любишь...  (14: 209-10) "I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in the spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. " (211)

"We have rectified your work and grounded it in the miraculous, the mysterious, and authority... (1: 392)— Мы исправили подвиг твой и основали его на ч у д е, тайне и авторитете.  (14: 234)

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"We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. " (237)

"... every man is at fault for all other men and for everything... " (1: 461)—... всякий человек за всех и за все виноват...  (14: 275) "... we are all responsible to all for all... " (282)

"Fathers and teachers, I ask myself, 'What is hell?' And I reason thus: 'It lies in suffering from being unable to love any more. ' (1: 490)—"Отцы и учители, мыслю: "Что есть ад?" Рассуждаю так: "Страдание о том, что нельзя уже более любить. "  (14: 292) "Fathers and teachers I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of no longer being able to love. " (301)

"... in all my lifetime, I've given away nothing but a single onion, and that's the only good deed to my credit. " (2: 46) —... всего-то я луковку какую-нибудь во всю жизнь мою подала, всего только на мне и есть добродетели. (14: 319) "I've done nothing but give away one onion all my life, that's the only good deed I've done. " (331)

"I'll tell you what you are to do: you'll locate the gold-mine, make millions, return here, become a public figure and guide us forward to good deeds. Is all this to be left to the Jews?" (2; 93-4) — Я вам скажу вашу идею: вы отыщете прииски, наживете миллион, воротитесь и станете деятелем, будете и нас двигать, направляя к добру. Неужели же все предоставить жидам? (14: 378) "I'll make you a present of the idea: you shall find gold mines, make millions, return and become a leader, and wake us up and lead us to better things. Are we to leave it all to the Jews?" (363)

"'Why are they crying? Why are they crying?' Mitya asked, as they dashed past them at a spanking pace. 'It's the bairn, sir, ' replied the driver, 'the bairn's crying. '" (2: 272)—Что они плачут? Чего они плачут?—спрашивает, лихо пролетая мимо них, Митя. —Дите, —отвечает ему ямщик, — дите плачет.  (14: 456) "'Why are they crying? Why are they crying?' Mitya asked, as they dashed gaily by. 'It's the babe, ' answered the driver, 'the babe weeping. '" (479)

"'That's how it will always be, arm in arm throughout life! Three cheers for Karamazov!' Kolya again cried with enthusiasm, and once again all the boys burst into

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cheers. '" (2: 661) ——И вечно так, всю жизнь рука в руку! Ура Карамазову! —еще раз восторженно прокричал Коля, и еще раз все мальчики прохватили его восклицание. (15: 197) "'And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!' Kolya cried once more rapturously and once more all the boys chimed in. " (735)

But for Garnett's translation to compare it against, Katzer's version would not read too badly. Certainly it contains few errors. However, all too often there is evidence that Katzer has no ear for English speech rhythms. For instance: "the miraculous, the mysterious and authority" as opposed to "miracle, mystery and authority. " (Here Katzer also shows a lack of feel for grammatical parallelism. ) It is possible that Katzer, or his editors, felt obliged to alter all such famous lines, so as not to appear to be copying. However, I believe "copying" is preferred (perhaps with an apologizing footnote).

It does seem, however, that Garnett is almost always more aware of rhythm than Katzer, even in the more obscure passages. There may also be more "unsuitable" Britishisms in Katzer, as the word "bairn" possibly indicates. (Although here again Katzer may simply have been searching for any word besides "babe" that would somehow fit. )

More broadly, Garnett's style is simply more literary, more concise: closer to Dostoevsky's own. A word count of all the passages quoted above yields 227 words for Katzer, 206 for Garnett, and 160 for Dostoevsky. Garnett is 29 percent wordier than the source, Katzer 42 percent, As English normally requires 20-25 percent more words in literal translation from the Russian, one can see that even Garnett fails to equal Dostoevsky's concise ness of expression. But Katzer is less economical by an additional 10-15 percent—one measure of the inferiority of his translation.

Everything considered, Katzer was probably not making an all-out effort to improve on Garnett, but was simply doing his best to fulfill an assignment from Progress too to prepare an English translation of Brat'ja Karamazovy for the centennial of Dostoevsky's death. His text has been attractively illustrated (in a sort of nineteenth-century manner) by V. Minjaev, while Jurij Seleznev has written a non-polemical Afterword of about twenty pages that intelligently examines Dostoevsky's

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spirituality. Such a project should be welcomed, even if the final product has shortcomings.

Donald M. Fiene

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

F. M. Dostoevsky. Poor Folk. Translated and with an Introduction by Robert Dessaix. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982. 143 pp. Cloth, $ 12. 5O, paper, $ 4. 50.

The blurb on the back cover of Ardis's translation of Poor Folk proclaims:

This is the first new translation of Dostoevsky's first novel since Constance Garnett's. Mr. Dessaix is not only more accurate than Garnett, but also makes an effort to deal with the sharply different styles in the epistolary novel in a consistent way.

In fact, a quick check on the first of these claims reveals that at least two other translations were published between Garnett and Dessaix, one British and one Soviet: A. R. MacAndrew (1966) and Olga Shartse and Julius Katzer (1971). However, as regards the second and third contentions, the promotion manager at Ardis comes nearer the truth. Robert Dessaix, Professor of Russian Literature at the University of New South Wales, has provided a rendition of Poor Folk which is more accurate than Garnett's, and one which attempts and achieves a fair measure of success in distinguishing the "sharply different styles" in the novel.

The translation itself is competent. In general, it reads well. At times it is inspired; occasionally it is too literal and consequently awkward. In his brief introduction Dessaix argues that Poor Folk represents the intersection of several lines of development in Russian prose (sentimentalism, naturalism, and the "phenomenon of Gogol"); that the novel can be read as a dialogue between Pushkin and Gogol as viewed from the mid-1840's; that the entire work can be viewed as a literary exercise "almost to the point of being metaprose. " The last statement strikes this reviewer as exaggerated, but it nevertheless serves to emphasize

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the "literariness of the text. " In addition Dessaix surveys the background to the writing of the novel (both biographical and literary), the polemical character of the critical reactions to its publication, and its direct links to the author's later works.

The text has a total of seven short footnotes—(almost half of which annotate one sentence)—too small a number to be of any use to serious students of Russian literature.

Typographical errors abound—more than the usual number for an Ardis publication. They are to be found in the introduction, the text, the footnotes, even in the blurb on the back cover. When poor Gorshkov's honor is finally restored and his name is cleared, he is said to be "totally exhonorated. " (p. 127)

The single most important feature of the work is the fact of its appearance. Its publication makes Dostoevsky's first novel available to non-Russian speakers and to students in survey courses and Dostoevsky seminars.

Michael R. Katz Williams College

Erik Egeberg, ed. F. M. Dostoevskij 1821-1881-1981. Fire forelesninger. (Four Lectures). Tromsø: Universitetet i Tromsø. Institutt for sprak og litteratur, 1982. 86 pp.

During the spring term of 1981 seminars devoted to the memory of Dostoevsky were arranged at the Universities of Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø. Eleven of the papers presented at these seminars have appeared in a book edited by Erik Egeberg, Sigurd Pasting, Geir Kjetsaa & Aleksej D. Perminow: Streiftog i Dostojevskijs verden (Wanderings in the World of Dostoevsky), Oslo, 1982. In addition Professor Egeberg has now published four more articles, the authors of which all have Tromsø as their center of activity.

The result is a most interesting volume introduced by the editor's provocative question, "Why Dostoevsky?". Stressing Dostoevsky's tendency to experiment, Egeberg

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claims Dostoevsky to be the creator of a mythic novel, in which basic truths are expressed as action and people live their lives in accordance with certain archetypical patterns. In another article about The Insulted and the Injured Egeberg proves Dostoevsky to be right when he wrote that even in this "crude work" there were "a half-hundred pages of which I am proud. " Stimulating, too, is Jan Brodal's contribution, "The Devils. Conspiracy as hubris". The author naturally concentrates on Stavrogin, convincingly showing the inner logic of his death: In Dostoevsky's view rebellion against God is an anomaly which must sooner or later come to an end. In the last article of the volume Ingvild Broch gives a fine analysis of Krotkaja, comparing it, and favorably so, to another tragic account of the relationship between man and woman, The Kreutzer Sonata.

Geir Kjetsaa University of Oslo

Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky, The years of Ordeal, 1859-1859. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 320 pp. Cloth, $ 25, -, paper, $ 8. 95.

This is the second volume of the projected four-volume biography of Dostoevsky. The first, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, appeared in 1978. There Frank reconstructed the early years of Dostoevsky's life, as man and author, from the existing sources, with care, meticulousness, and good sense in a way that had not been done before, not even by the Soviets, for whom the existing documents were more accessible. Furthermore, he placed these facts in a socio-cultural matrix that enhanced their significance beyond personal import. In sifting so carefully and painstakingly the existing documents, Frank had broken through the crust of repetitions that afflict the biographies of established writers. The biographies of Dostoevsky, before Frank, looked at each other more than they looked at the documents themselves. Frank was fresh because he had read everything again. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt was an important event for Dostoevsky studies; the promise has not been betrayed in Dostoevsky, The Years of Ordeal,

In this volume Frank covers the momentous years of

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spiritual and psychological change for Dostoevsky: his arrest and imprisonment, service in the army, marriage to Marja Isaeva, and the first stages of his literary resurrection. Prank's method is the same as in the earlier volume: to examine the documents we have and to say nothing that goes beyond the immediate import of those documents. He gives himself no luxury of fictionalizing and only the barest in speculation. His tone is dry, detached, scientific, and scholarly in the best sense. The method has its obvious merits and it will offend few. Yet the documents we have are not many and the road from document to conclusion is not single. The documents do not speak for themselves; we have to make them speak; and when we do, we bring in our points of view, if not our biases. The strictly objective point of view is at best an ideal and at worst, a deception. What is perhaps more important, and almost never mentioned, is that the documents that have survived may be less important than those that have not, and they are surely fewer in number. We have only a small fraction of what we would need to make even the remotest semblance of objective truth. We are implicated whatever we pretend, and we might as well be implicated with the best we can offer. Part of that best may be those systems of thought that have developed since the historical moment. History is always reconception. But Frank will have none of Freud, Marx, or structuralism, all of which have had some effect on the way we reconceive the past.

Frank has chosen to be judged by strict historical documentariness and by a procedure of narrow inference from what we can read, touch, and verify. He is faithful to these criteria, with few lapses, and he uses the method clearly and well. The central fact of the years of this volume for Dostoevsky's biography is the spiritual and psychological changes that Dostoevsky went through in prison and in the years immediately following, and the consequent changes in his views on Russia, the West, and the condition of man. This change has often been schematized as a change from liberal to conservative, radical to reactionary, atheist to believer, plotter against the Tsar to defender of the Tsar. It has become more and more difficult to justify such schematisms, but the difficulty has not deterred some. The life of errors is not short. Dostoevsky was a believer in the forties, for example, and a believer after imprisonment. Nor was there any reason for him not to believe because of his participation in the

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Petrashevsky circle. Some of the members were virulently anti-religious, but others not; and the French Utopian Socialists they were reading based their theories often on a new Christianity. And if he plotted against the Tsar—and he did—he was probably dragged into the plot by his youthful idealism and by the wily Speshnev.

What Frank does is complicate and problematize the schematisms. According to him, Dostoevsky was assaulted by many impressions in prison, the broadest and deepest of which was a consciousness of his separation from the people in prison. They looked at him as a member of a special class, who did not and could not share their lives. He felt his aristocratic and intellectual status and the hatred that the people felt for him and his class. This new and painful consciousness led him to efforts to understand the people and to share their lives as much as possible; it led, too, to an appreciation and acceptance of the values they lived by. According to Frank no momentous change occurs in Dostoevsky's life, but he experiences a growing, deep, and lasting conviction that the real Russia resides in the body of the people and not in the views and consciousness of the intellectuals and their borrowed ideas from the West. The Petrashevcys and Dostoevsky with them had idealized and sentimentalized the people without knowing them and as such had loved not the people but their own abstractions. However wrong the people might be in their acts, they were, for Dostoevsky, right in their thoughts, because they acknowledged their wrongness and a power beyond their wills and consciousness. They had faith and with that faith, they had life.

Frank argues, in short, that Dostoevsky discovered good in the people in prison, and it is not surprising that his argument is directed against Shestov and those who maintained that Dostoevsky discovered not good, but evil in man in prison. For Shestov Dostoevsky discovered the "executioner" in man and saw the abyss that separated the reality of man's nature from those sentimentalized conceptions of man entertained by the Petrashevcys and a century of humanism. The contrasting views of Frank and Shestov are not new, but are variations of an argument with a long history. Frank's view is a resurrection of the views of Solov'ev, Mochul'skij and Simmons, for example. In Tri rechi (1881-1883) Solov'ev had said "The bad people of 'The House of the Dead' gave back to Dostoevsky what the 'best' of the intelligentsia had taken away from him, " and that Dostoevsky's "religious

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faith was reborn and made whole again under the impression of the humble and devout faith of the prisoners. " (1) Mochul'skij believed that Dostoevsky the populist was born in prison, (2) and Ernest Simmons went on at some length about the good qualities Dostoevsky found in the people in prison; Simmons speaks of "qualities of calm, courage, real goodness and even a certain nobility of soul" as among those Dostoevsky found in the prisoners, and he speaks of "Dostoevsky's growing faith in the Russian masses. " (3). Yet, we have to remind ourselves that the narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead also says: "Only in prison did I hear stories of the most frightful and most unnatural acts and of the most monstrous murders, all told with highly unrestrained and childlike laughter. " Simmons does not mention the countervailing evidence; Frank brings it up without comment and without modification of his thesis.

It would not be a distortion to say that over the past generation, the canonical Dostoevsky, at least in the West, has been the nihilistic Dostoevsky: the Dostoevsky who populated his world with tormented and tormenting characters, fated to destroy themselves and others. But in recent years there seems to be a slight groundswell toward giving us a kinder, more Christian, and less nihilistic Dostoevsky. Robert Jackson in his 1981 The Art of Dostoevsky argued that Dostoevsky's work is permeated with Christian truths and ideals, that even the most nihilistic heroes ache for some higher ideal and that the evil they commit is in the service of truth. The canonical view of Dostoevsky has always acknowledged that Dostoevsky the man believed in the people, God and Christianity, and always argued that there is a profound contradiction between the man and the writer. It is this contradiction that has been attacked by Jackson and now by Frank. Both have challenged a too easy view of the nihilistic Dostoevsky and a one-sided view. Dostoevsky's nihilism is not pervaded with cynicism and despair. It is too alive, painful, and tormenting to be beyond hope. One feels too much; and in a thorough- going nihilism, one feels nothing. In making one conscious of the thirst for God that Dostoevskian characters experience, even in their most bestial moments, Jackson and Frank deepen the dialectic that rages so fiercely between faith and unfaith in Dostoevsky's works. What I cannot accept in Frank and Jackson is the attempt on the part of each to quiet the fire of this dialectic. Dostoevsky believed in Christianity and made us feel what a world without faith would be. He believed in

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the people, and yet he thought them capable of anything. The struggle never ends for Dostoevsky, and to end it is to destroy Dostoevsky.

In order to establish their "good" Dostoevsky, both Frank and Jackson have leaned heavily on Notes from the House of the Dead, a work of considerable importance but not one that can be considered of primary importance. Frank announces early in his work that in reconstructing his Dostoevsky, he will go from life to work, but not from work to life. He wants no fictional biography. Yet he acknowledges without blush that he intends to treat the "fictional" Notes from the House of the Dead as a biographical document. He needs it to establish his "good" Dostoevsky. I would have appreciated it if both had bitten the bit and shown us how the "good" shines in the most nihilistic of Dostoevsky's characters: in Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, Rogozhin, the Grand Inquisitor. And if the central fact of Dostoevsky's regeneration of convictions is the discovery of the good people, why is it that they play almost no part in his major works? Others with much less talent—Turgenev, for example—had no trouble in finding a place for them in his fiction. I assume—contrary to Henry James—that there is a tie between what you believe and what you write about, that what you write about is what you are interested in. Dostoevsky wrote about civil servants, noblemen, governesses, students, and merchants, but not about the people. When they appear, they are secondary. What seemed to captivate him was the spectacle of post- Renaissance man taking command of his destiny, a destiny emptied of Gods and assured paths. Albert Camus understood this three-quarters of a century later and despite the profound differences of their public and personal beliefs, he was passionately attached to the spectacle of Dostoevsky's great and tragic seekers of freedom and dignity. Camus knew where the passion and truth of Dostoevsky lay, and it did not lie with the "people" and a sentimentalized goodness.

The fires of this argument will not be quieted by Frank's book, and Frank's contribution is to pose it again in a context thoroughly researched. The importance of the argument should not take away from the magnificent work of the rest of the volume: his treatment of Dostoevsky's life in the army, his courtship and marriage to Marja Isaeva, and his efforts to re-enter the literary world. Frank's biography is a continuing major event.

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NOTES

1. Vladimir Soloviov, Tri rechi, 1881-1883 (Berlin, 1925), p. 13. My translation.
2. K. Mochul'skij, Dostoevsky, zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Paris, 1947), p. 161.
3. Ernest Simmons, Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist (London, 1950), p. 84.

Edward Wasiolek

The University of Chicago

John Jones. Dostoevsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. x, 365 pp., $ 29. 95.

In his treatment of Dostoevsky John Jones combines description of narrative point of view in the best-known novels (excluding, remarkably, The Idiot) with wide- ranging essays on thematics.

In treating narrative technique Jones discusses variations of first-person narration as they intersect third person omniscience. In Poor Folk the exchange of letters is described as a series of "frameless" contacts between author and reader. In The Double the narrator's sympathy for Goljadkin "Sr. " implies "a conspiracy between reader and poet" (p. 13O), an irony which distances us from the mad hero and his adventures. Notes From the House of the Dead presents an editor-narrator who introduces the protagonist-narrator. The latter is prone to speak at different moments of his own "I, " then as "we" or "they" (when commenting on the other convicts), and "everyone" (when referring to the whole of the camp or man at large). The result, says Jones, is a significant flexibility of composition (p. 166). Notes From Underground, for all its confessional trappings, is treated as a "fable of divided consciousness" (p. 177). It is introduced by the persona of an editor who then disappears, only speaking again briefly at the end to frame the hero's story with arbitrary closure. Crime and Punishment joins third person omniscience with what amounts to a personalized view of Raskolnikov's stream of consciousness. What moderates this interplay is a certain syntactic indeterminacy which infiltrates third person narration (e. g. ambiguous terms like "strange"

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or "it seemed") which put us both inside and outside Raskolnikov's flow of thought. In The Possessed, Jones suggests, there is a "slippage" between the narrator, with his limited knowledge of events in "our town, " and the factual "chronicle" he purports to set down. "The result, therefore, is a framed narrative without a frame narrator... " (p. 268) for the narrator is reduced to being a character within his own account. Such slippage, Jones says, joins fact and rumor, thereby adding substantially to the novel's momentum of precarious instability and inscrutible motivation. The Brothers Karamazov purports to a narrator but he is in fact without personality, "unqualified, " and presents us with a "flaunted frame" or "ghost frame" (p. 305) which opens the novel to the impression of life's ongoing openendedness.

Discussions of narrative point of view are at times quite stimulating (e. g. Jones' assessment of a pervasive instability in The Possessed). But as it develops, his treatment of narration, and especially his presentation of the principles of narrative technique, are less central to this book than its author suggests in his preface. There is no worked out theory presented and bibliography on the subject is absent.

It is Jones's artistic eye for detail, not his analysis of narrative structures, which lights up the novels from the inside. The essays which develop around such details are often engaging and show considerable powers of observation. Examples are numerous and bear up well under examination. Devushkin's repetition of half phrases and empty cliches captures his existential as well as social marginality. He tries to compose himself by an incantational attention to the linguistic style of half-digested social formalities. The act of writing is, finally, more important to him than what he says. Discussion of the jumbled physical details in Crime and Punishment emphasizes their factual, naturalistic immediacy. At the same time these same details are pressed together into a symbolic patina around the action, guiding it toward metaphysical abstractions. Water (p. 222) and the color yellow (p. 216 and elsewhere) stand out particularly. This mixture of surreal symbolism and the concreteness of observed physicality underpins the artistic power evident in the trance-like murder as it is played off against the painters' healthy laughter below. In The Possessed Jones is completely on target in emphasizing the childish, toy-preoccupied, and amateurish details

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which accumulate around von Lembke's paper town, Liputin's toy whistle, and the juvenile rowdiness of the fête. These are consistently counterbalanced by the dangerously serious events which in fact flow from them (von Lembke's madness, Liputin's complicity in a grotesque murder, and the breakdown of social coherence). The basal instability and disjunction which Jones sees in these funny-serious contrasts correctly catches the novel's building apocalypse with considerable force and economy. As a final example, Jones very nicely fastens on smell as a guiding metaphor in The Brothers Karamazov (p. 318). The protracted smerd pun and Zosima's corpse do not end the matter. Smell for Jones is an elemental kind of knowledge, a link to unconscious processes which Dostoevsky weaves into the Karamazov nature and, by extension, into human nature. Smell suggests an organic process which exceeds moral distinctions in the Karamazov house just as that sense encompasses fresh and rotten in the garden. It is no coincidence that the prosecutor at Dmitrij's trial terms his supposed murder act "the very smell of Russia. "

As sharp as Jones's eye is for telling details, and the several excellent essays which develop from them, there are some disappointing lapses which bear mentioning. There are, for example, only scattered references to important existing studies of Dostoevsky, even though Jones repeats some of their standard interpretations of character. For example we read that Svidrigajlov serves as Raskolnikov's double, heightening and playing out the letter's will to self assertion with its final burden of alienated nihilism (p. 223). Stavrogin is static, flat and narrative action in The Possessed centers about other characters whom Stavrogin has influenced in the past (pp. 290-91). At other times Jones dismisses, almost airily, the significance of potent characters and whole symbolic complexes. The most obvious example is found in his treatment of Zosima and the question of mutual responsibility summarized in the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 330-31). Scanty treatment of Zosima is then followed by an involved and long discussion (over 25 pages) of the 1, 500 rubles sewed up around Dmitrij's neck. Dismissal of significant questions in Dostoevsky scholarship, like Zosima and his value in Book VI, extends to The Idiot as a whole. Jones discounts it ostensibly on the grounds that its narrative design of third person narration is a failure. It seems reasonable, at the least, to expect some substantiation of that judgment, especially since arguments about narrative

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complexity, including the presence of a narrator in the work, have been made elsewhere. In view of the novel's extraordinary density of symbol and event it is a disservice to reject it out of hand, as Jones does, as "forced, hysterical, hyperbolic, and boring" (x).

The style of writing here is explicitly subjective, as fits the essayistic organization of each chapter. Jones' manner will no doubt appeal to some readers more than to others for it tends to be associative and, at times, is given to digressive comparisons of Dostoevsky with other authors (chiefly British). The highly metaphorical quality of Jones' style can be poetically apt, but it can at times be disconcerting as well.

There is certainly room for this book on one's Dostoevsky shelf. It is provocative and often keenly observant of details which guide larger thematic designs. Although it will not displace standard readings of Dostoevsky, and it does not deliver the sustained investigation of narrative technique it proposes in the preface, Jones accomplishes a vigorous, independent reading of the novels which will reward his readers with numerous delightful insights.

Roger Anderson

University of Kentucky

Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry, eds. New Essays on Dostoyevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ix, 252 pp. Cloth.

The book - a companion volume to Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge University Press, 1978; ed. M. Jones) - is dedicated to the outstanding scholar Professor Janko Lavrin in recognition of his contribution to Dostoevsky studies. The articles come mainly from members of the (British) Nineteenth Century Russian Literature Seminar, a group of scholars maintaining close ties with the International Dostoevsky Society.

Malcolm Jones has provided an eminently useful and informative introductory essay summarizing the main facts of Dostoevsky's biography and relating them to his development as a writer and thinker. Jones concludes

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his essay with an exhaustive discussion of Dostoevsky's draft for The Emperor, a novel which remained unwritten. According to Jones, the draft contains some of Dostoevsky's essential concerns. Mr. Terry's most welcome bibliographical survey of Dostoevsky Studies (including book reviews and translations of Dostoevsky's works) published in Great Britain between 1945 and 1981 concludes the book. Terry lists titles by year of publication and provides his survey with an index of authors' names and an index of translations. The remaining essays are divided into two parts, the first comprising studies of individual works, the second dealing with thematic issues (religious, philosophic, and formal aspects).

Victor Terras' review of recent scholarship on the works of the young Dostoevsky (until 1849) opens Part I. Terras' essay attempts to "identify and outline certain important issues" (p. 21) such as research into Dostoevsky's biography and its reflection in the early work. Attention is focused there mainly on studies by V. S. Nechaeva and D. Arban. Literary sources and models, ideological influences (Pushkin, Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Fourier, etc. ) are discussed next with specific references to studies by J. Frank, W. J. Leatherbarrow, R. Neuhäuser, G. Rosenshield and the author's own study of the young Dostoevsky. Social and philosophical ideas are reviewed with regard to studies by G. Kiraly, J. Frank, and R. Neuhäuser's recent book on the Frühwerk with additional references to K. Onasch and R. B. Anderson. The Double and Poor Folk serve as sources with regard to this aspect. Dostoevsky's "alleged polyphonic style" (p. 33) is discussed mainly with reference to W. Schmid's work on The Double. Terras' conclusion is that the thesis of polyphony is "fundamentally wrong in its theoretical postulates" (p. 35). Following a brief review of recent studies of Dostoevsky's use of psychology, Terras concludes by pointing to D. S. Mirsky who defined the young Dostoevsky as a "different writer from the author of his later novels: a lesser writer, no doubt, but not a minor one" adding that as a stylist and psychologist the young Dostoevsky nevertheless anticipated the Dostoevsky of the great novels.

Derek Offord investigates Dostoevsky's running battle with the radical thought of the 1860's in Crime and Punishment. Views such as crime being the consequence of material need and the malfunctioning of society (Chernyshevsky and Dobroljubov) and the radical rebel versus an enslaved society (Pisarev), moved Dostoevsky

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to investigate "the causes of crime and the meaning of law" (so the title of Offord's contribution).

Sidney Monas builds his paper on the image of the threshold, a metaphor reflecting Dostoevsky's own situation and expanded to cover dreams and hallucinations, i. e., liminal conditions in general. "The Idiot as a Petersburg tale" (the subtitle of the paper) embodies the "liminal" nature of the specific, urban setting of St. Petersburg. This is not quite accurate as considerable portions of the book (all of Part III, most of Part IV, and half of Part II7 are set at Pavlovsk, which strikes the reader with its Rousseau'an landscape I Occasionally Monas tends to use overly schematic characterizations - a "dark princess and prince" are opposed to a "bright princess and prince", the "beauty of the Madonna" once more does battle with the "beauty of Sodom. " Dostoevsky's notebooks are accepted on the same level with the novel's text to support the critic's arguments. Monas's essayistic and brilliantly written study eventually ends with a reference to the final "threshold" crossed by Rogozhin when he is sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, and the critic's speculation that this could well have been the starting point for Dostoevsky's project concerning the life of a great sinner.

R. M. Davison's excellent contribution investigates the "centrality" of Dostoevskian heroes which is so conspicuously absent in The Demons, Stavrogin's "deficiency" in this respect is seen as a reflection of his social situation. The reader's attention is skillfully maintained, Stavrogin's status - his "sanity" or "madness"— kept unclear on purpose. Davison's conclusion: the novel is a "convincing demonstration of how to maintain artistic coherence in telling a story explicitly devoted to disintegration" (p. 113)

The concluding essay of Part I is by Frank Seeley who attempts to outline the genesis of Ivan Karamazov's thinking. Seeley's approach invites criticism by using the novel as raw material out of which the critic fashions the hero's biography. This might have been the proper approach for an investigation of the real- life Ivan, if there ever had been one. It is difficult to determine the relevancy of this procedure for a literary figure. Seeley argues that Dostoevsky was aware of Darwinian thinking and its application in Zola's writings and sees it reflected in Dostoevsky's novel. On this premise he builds his ingenious reconstruction of Ivan's (and his brothers') psychological and intel-

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lectual development - practically from earliest youth to the time of the crime. Occasionally the reader does get unexpected insights as when Seeley claims that Ivan's inability to show compassion and love for his neighbors is rooted in the experience of a childhood without love. Seeley finds four texts in the novel which document as many stages in Ivan's intellectual development. Rearranged in proper chronological order, they are: the legend of the unbelieving philosopher told by the devil and referring back to Ivan's high school days when faith was still accessible to him; the famous legend of the Grand Inquisitor which originated five years later; the article on ecclesiastical courts written about half a year later; and the "Geological Upheaval" again related by Ivan's double, the devil. Seeley's thought-provoking essay adds another dimension to Ivan, although one which is barely indicated in the novel.

Part II of the collection begins with Sergei Hackel's learned and weighty study of "Zosima's discourse", i. e., Dostoevsky's art of religious discourse ("zhitiinoe slovo", Bakhtin), drawing attention to a great variety of sources which may have served as models for Dostoevsky's choice of motifs and his mode of presentation in Zosima's confession as well as for Alesha's reaction to the teachings of the elder. To my knowledge, Hackel's essay is the most comprehensive treatment of the topic and deserves particular praise for the accurate and detailed information provided on Dostoevsky's sources.

Stewart Sutherland discusses the notion of freedom with reference to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. Being a philosopher by profession, Sutherland is not concerned with the literary text as such, but rather with the underlying philosophic assumptions and their implications for the world view of the author. The essay may not tell the reader anything new about the text and how it is "made, " yet it demonstrates clearly and convincingly the evolution of Dostoevsky's argument. The Notes from Underground begin the polemic with determinism - the denial of freedom - with an affirmation of the self and its unpredictability. The Man from Underground "retains for himself this final word about himself" (D. MacKay as quoted by Sutherland) and thereby the freedom to act as he may see fit. In Crime and Punishment the element of self- assertion accompanied by isolation assumes greater prominence. The Brothers Karamazov, according to Sutherland, modifies Dostoevsky's understanding of freedom, which

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now appears as something "not necessarily to be accepted without hesitation" (p. 184). Regrettably, Dostoevsky's major novel is dealt with only on the last two pages of the essay in a rather superficial manner and apparently without knowledge of pertinent studies (such as those by Golosovker and Gerigk on the relationship between Dostoevsky and Kant).

Christopher Pike reviews "Formalist and structuralist approaches to Dostoevsky" referring to studies by Shklovskij, Tynjanov, Vinogradov, and Bakhtin. Pike focuses his attention particularly on the latter and outlines his influence on subsequent Western and Soviet criticism. Post-Bakhtinian structuralist criticism is reviewed mainly with extensive references to the studies of Wolf Schmid. Altogether Pike's essay is an excellent introduction to the topic and provides much additional valuable Information in its annotation (five pages).

In summary, this volume is well worth reading. Its balanced contents should appeal both to the Dostoevsky specialist and the general reader and student. The specialist will notice that several essays, with some noticeable exceptions, particularly the contributions by Terras, Hackel, and Pike, belie the editor's claim that the "study of Dostoevsky has become very much an international affair" (p. 2), insofar as they refer solely to criticism in English and Russian - one essay even disregarding Dostoevsky scholarship entirely (apart from one reference to one other publication by its author) The transliteration also poses problems to the uninitiated by providing some rather curious spellings (Belyy, proklyatyye, taynoye zhelaniye, poyavilsya, polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, yego, etc. ). Apart from these minor points, the volume is professional in appearance and contents, and indicative of the wide range of interest in Dostoevsky and the equally wide range of approaches to his work.

Rudolf Neuhäuser

Klagenfurt University