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REVIEWSR.L. Busch. Humor in the Major Novels of F.M. Dostoevsky. Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1987. 168 pp. Paper. R.L. Busch has chosen a topic he feels has been "largely" ignored by scholars and critics," although it has not been "totally neglected." The two major works to treat the humorous elements in Dostoevsky 's works are M.M. Bakhtin's Problems in the Poetics of Dostoevsky and Ronald Hingley's The Undiscovered Dostoevsky. Attempting to expand on and go beyond the existing scholarship, Busch set himself five goals, which he enumerates in his introduction: "1) to test Bakhtin's theses concerning parodic satellites for Dostoevsky's major characters; 2) to show in detail how these parodic voices operate; 3) to point out and discuss Dostoevsky's major characters; 2) to show in detail how these parodic voices operate; 3) to point out and discuss Dostoevsky's satire, especially insofar as it is important for the fullest understanding of the novel in which it figures; 4) to give requisite attention to the special stylistic effects which Dostoevsky uses to achieve humorous nuances; 5) to bring out at length the tonal playoff characteristic of the polyphonic novel" (p. 19). Perhaps Busch attempted to do too many things. Since (as Busch himself argues) it is often next to impossible to separate the comic elements from the tragic ones, any discussion of the former will necessitate some discussion of the latter. One consequence is that Busch ends up having to devote a lot of space to generalities about the novels. Busch attempts to perform these operations for the five major novels (included is The Adolescent) . The organization within a given chapter is paratactic. Busch ends his chapters abruptly, largely without pulling together the material, summarizing, drawing conclusions, or posing further questions. The book itself appears to end in media res. Having discussed the relationship between Ivan Karamazov and his devil, Busch writes: "It is a hallmark of Dostoevsky 's tonally complex artistry that the process, however serious and painful, is accompanied by humorous counterpoint." (The "process" referred to here is that of Ivan's regeneration, the "purging [of] his negative ideas.") Its final sentence is emblematic of the book as a whole. This book performs the worthy task of drawing attention to the humorous elements which other elements of Dostoevsky's works sometimes threaten to upstage. Some readers may nevertheless find that Busch spends too much effort positing the humor and not enough showing how it works.
Liza Knapp Berkeley, California
Selected letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Edited by Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein. Tr. by Andrew R. MacAndrew. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick and London. 1987. 543 pp. Cloth $ 29.95 In the last twenty years we have witnessed a great many translations of Dostoevsky's extraliterary writings. The non-Russian reading scholar has been exposed to the intricacies of Dostoevsky's "creative laboratory" through, among other things, Wasiolek's and Terras's excellent translations of the notebooks to Dostoevsky's major novels, and Ardis's somewhat uneven translation of Dostoevsky's notebooks and diaries of 1860-1881 done by a collective of translators working for Ardis. Yet, translators have continued to slight Dostoevsky's letters, even though scholars often cite their importance in understandig his life and works. In fact, before the publication of the two works under review here the only translations of Dostoevsky's letters that I know of are the highly selective collections compiled by Elizabeth Hill and Doris Mudie, The Letters of Dostoevsky to his Wife (New York, 1930); S.S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murray, Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences (New York, 1923) , and Ethel Coburn Mayne, Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends (London, 1914). Now, however, this shortcoming has been redressed thanks to two recent new translations of Dostoevsky 's letters. The Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, edited by Frank and Goldstein and translated by Andrew MacAndrew, is a compilation of 155 letters translated in their entirety which, according to the editors, were selected because they are the "most revealing, in terms of the author's literary career and personal fortune." (xix) Frank points out in the introduction that this volume is the culmination of a long-term project (David Goldstein, his co-editor, who worked on the edition for may years, unfortunately died before it was published)! This explains why the editors based their translations on A.S. Dolinin's four volume edition rather than on the more recent texts collected by the Dotoevsky scholars working at the Leningrad Academy of Science (Pushkin House) in volumes 28-30 of Dostoevsky's Complete Works in 30 Volumes. The volume's 155 letters are divided into four chronologically arranged sections with forty letters from the period 1821-1859, twenty-eight letters from 1860-1866, twenty-two from 1867-1871, sixty-five letters from 1872-1881. Each section begins with a short introduction outlining the most important events of the time period and attempts, unsuccessfully it seems to me, to provide continuity by filling in the time lapses which necessarily occur between selected letters. In addition to a very cursory chronology of Dostoevsky's life and works and a genealogy of the Dostoevsky family, there is a glossary of Dostoevsky's family members and other persons frequently mentioned in the letters. The glossary, while incomplete, gives rather informative and helpful biographical sketches. There are interesting but incomplete notes which are watered-down versions of Dolinin's very detailed annotations. In reading the letters one longs for more commentary and a more comprehensive translation of Dolinin's comments. Further, for some inexplicable reason, the editors omit the rather simple procedure of footnoting the letters, and force the reader to guess at which
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person or item might be discussed in the notes or the Glossary. This makes for very annoying and disjointed reading, as one constantly must turn to the end of the book or letter in the hope (often vain) of finding a particular item. Dostoevsky's Complete Letters, edited and translated by David Lowe and Ronald Meyer, is a much more ambitious project which will ultimately render the Selected Letters obsolete. Volume I, the first book of a proposed five-volume translation of Dostoevsky's complete letters, covers the period 1832-1859 and consists of 171 letters to friends, family and acquaintances and ten letters of "official correspondence." Lowe and Meyer base their translations on the Leningrad Academy of Science edition of Dostoevsky's Complete Works in 30 Volumes, and their book corresponds directly, including letter numeration, to Volume 28, Book 1 of that set. The editors annotate the letters, using primarily cut-down versions of the excellent notes found in the Russian edition. Again, as in the Selected Letters, they are useful but tend to be too brief. In contrast, however, the items are footnoted in the text and the information is given on the same page as the text and thus are easily accessible to the reader. The editors supplement the Russian edition with footnotes aimed at readers unfamiliar with Russian literature and history. This results in an editorial tendency to repeat some footnotes, a tendency which in the case of Mikhail Dostoevsky's wife, Emiliia Fedorovna, reaches ridiculous proportions. After noting in letter 32 that Mikhail Dostoevsky married Emiliia Fedorovna von Ditmar, the editors continue to footnote and identify her no less than thirty times in the following seventy letters as Mikhail Dostoevsky's wife. Then, apparently satisfied that everyone must have this fact memorized by letter 103, they suddenly and mercifully drop her from the notes. While both these volumes have positive and negative aspects concerning their format, their true value and importance lie in the fact that, for the first time, they give the non-Russian reader access to Dostoevsky's personal concerns (especially money and) literary and philosophical comments as expressed in a broad sampling (and ultimately complete collection) of his letters. However, I view my task as reviewer not to summarize and comment on their content, but rather to judge how accurately the translators have rendered Dostoevsky's thought into English. Translation, generally under-appreciated in terms of scholarly merit or monetary remuneration, is a fiendishly difficult task. The translator's primary task of accurately transforming a work from one linguistic medium into another, places him or her in the paradoxical position of a slave inextricably tied to someone else's text, which is not his or hers to change arbitrarily, as well as a creator who must recast and refashion the original into a new text.
In the two translations under review, I have found no gross errors of substance and on the whole they communicate the semantics of Dostoevsky's letters. Yet, the translators of both works, in their own way sin in their inability to balance literalness with creativity Andrew MacAndrew, translator of the Selected Letters, tends to replace both Dostoevsky's nuances and sometimes rough—hewn style with his own smooth, easy to read text, and thus distorting the Dostoevsky
original. Lowe and Meyer, by their own admission, (p. 11) choose the path of literalism, and present a clumsy, broken, often difficult to understand style which ultimately does a disservice to Dostoevsky's text and the English language. A few brief examples will illustrate these points. MacAndrew renders Dostoevsky's "Все принимают меня как чудо," as Everyone considers me a phenomenon," (34) whereas Lowe and Meyer render a rather cryptic, "Everyone is receiving me like a miracle."(117). Dostoevsky's "В Иллустрации я читал не критику,а ругательство," becomes in MacAndrew, "What I read about in Illustration sounded more like abuse than criticism," (36) and in Lowe and Meyer: "In The Illustration I read swearing not criticism." (121) In Dostoevsky there is the brief "Живи положительно," which is rendered effusively by Andrew as, "Lead a purposeful, useful life," (52) and ambiguously by Lowe and Meyer as "Live positively." The somewhat longer example below indicate the awkward English which results from Lowe and Meyer's excessive literalness and the false smoothness of MacAndrew's tendency to recreate and subsume Dostoevsky's language style (and semantics) into his own. Dostoevsky writes,
MacAndrew: "Well, you see, brother, from all this I have deduced a wise precept: the most unprofitable course that a burgeoning talent can follow is to become friendly with the owners of publishing enterprises. For the inevitable consequence of it is familiarity, followed by various dirty tricks. What I need is an independent position and a chance to work with dedication for Holy Art in all the purity of my heart, a heart that has never before vibrated and throbbed within me the way it does now before the new images and characters that are springing up in my mind." (42) Lowe and Meyer: "You see what, brother: out of all this I have extracted a very wise rule. The 1st disadvantageous thing for a beginning talent is friendship with proprietors of publications, from which as an unavoidable consequence favoritism and then various obscenities proceed. Then independence of position, and finally, work for Holy Art, work that is sacred and pure in the simplicity of a heart that has never before so trembled in me as now before all the new images that are being created in my soul." (142)
Clearly, MacAndrew's English syntax is clearer and easier to understand than Lowe and Meyer's tortured English, and his word selection is also often better. MacAndrew's "Owners of publishing enterprises, for example, is certainly better than the non-sensical "proprietors of publications." On the other hand, MacAndrew imposes his will on the text as he not only refashions Dostoevsky's syntax but also adds words and formulates new sentence structures. Thus he renders 211 the final line as "images and characters are springing up in my mind," rather than the correct Meyer and Lowe "images are being created in my soul." The most troublesome aspect of this particular passage is MacAndrew's creative addition of "and characters," which does not exist in the Russian text, and leads the non-Russian speaking reader astray. Images are images, not characters, and Dostoevsky may or may not have had literary characters in mind when he wrote the thought. In any case, it is not for MacAndrew to decide what Dostoevsky had in mind. In the end result, both translations are flawed and have failed, in my opinion, to achieve maximum accuracy. MacAndrew's translation reads smoothly, but his propensity to rewrite, and thus transform Dostoevsky's text into his own, undermined my trust in his accuracy. To be sure, for the most part the translation is adequate, but without checking the original I was unsure if I was reading MacAndrew's or Dostoevsky's thoughts. Lowe and Meyer, on the other hand, could have rendered their translation more readable and accurate by freeing the English syntax from the Russian original and by making more inspired word choices. However, of the two translations I prefer Meyer and Lowe's. Despite its awkwardness, their translation is more accurate in its literalness and is worthy of the reader's trust that the thoughts are Dostoevsky's. Moreover, the translation of Dostoevsky's complete letters is long overdue and will provide a necessary complement to the translations of Dostoevsky's other extraliterary writings. Gene D. Fitzgerald University of Utah
The sixth volume of Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, emphasizes archival and textual materials. G.M. Fridlender, as editor, continues the job of refining and augmenting scholarly resources with an admirable thoroughness encompassing primary texts, secondary sources, and biographical material. The danger of scholarly industry and thoroughness turning to the pursuit of trivia is largely avoided. What appears to be trivial at firsthand, after all, often turns out to suggest genuinely important issues—or so nowadays argue critics of a deconstructive bent. The present endeavor, of course, is much more conservatively inclined than such modern critical approaches, but it carries with it values of solid scholarship that are attractive even in the midst of our contemporary theoretical meanderings.
The first section is the responsibility of T.I. Ornatskaja and brings together Dostoevsky's inscriptions, dedications and notations of address in various books, notebooks, and photographs. The second section includes essays on Dostoevsky's relationships with A.F. Vel'tman (V.A. Korshelev and A.V. Chernov), Lermontov (M.G. Gigolov), Turgenev (N.F. Budanova), Gorky (A.N. Murav'ev) and Blok (V.I. Sakharov). Of particular additional interest are
essays on Dostoevsky's response to non-Euclidian geometry (E.I. Kiiko), on The Idiot (E. Volodin), on future plans (A. Arkhipova and V.A. Viktorovich), on sources (largely Spanish) of the Grand Inquisitor (V.E. Bagno), and on the role of confession in The Brothers Karamazov (O.S. Soina) . The essays are introduced by Professor Fridlender and P.V. Palievskii in brief overviews of Dostoevsky scholarship. Both introductions offer intelligent generalizations about Dostoevsky's creative positioning in the nineteenth century and its relationship to twentieth century perceptions (Bakhtin, Rice). The third section includes seventeen short articles on largely biographical matters such as the blueprint of Dostoevsky's prison in Omsk (V.S. Vainerman), his Siberian notebook (V.P. Vladimirtsev), and two of Suslova's letters to Polonsky (G. Bograd). Other articles deal with Zola's reception of Crime and Punishment, the first Russian responses to the novel (P. Bekedin), Raskol'nikov and Napoleon (V. Mel'nik), Nekrasov and Dostoevsky (M. Blinchevskaja) and various minutiae to be added to the annotations of the collected works (M.D. El'zon). The volume concludes with V.S. Nechaeva's reminiscences of her early contacts with Dostoevsky's relatives and the founding of the first Dostoevsky museum. It provides a useful reminder of the beginnings of the solid tradition of research which this endeavor continues. Nicholas Rzhevsky State University of New York, Stony Brook
Liza Knapp has prepared the first publication in English of all the major documents from the Petrashevskii Affair that concern Dostoevsky-testimony, despositions, letters, etc. Such a book, focusing as it ultimately does on the death sentence given and then rescinded on December 22, 1849, the great watershed in Dostoevsky's life, is fully justified; one only wonders why it had not appeared earlier. By and large Professor Knapp lets the documents speak for themselves, reserving her comments, analysis and summary for an introductory chapter of twenty pages bearing the same title as the book. The introduction presents the main figures in the Petrashevsky drama and remarks on such matters as Dostoevsky's convoluted style, in some of his statements, resulting from his efforts to mitigate the guilt of his associates. Knapp comments that in order to include in his testimony for the Investigating Commission "everything he could to vindicate the accused, Dostoevsky resorts to some byzantine digressions. His syntax becomes frantic and strained as he piles up clauses and phrases in an attempt to convey the proper nuance. His use of qualifying words, phrases and clauses becomes particularly pronounced. In this instance, form and content merge, since what he was engaged in writing was essentially all qualification of potentially compromising statements and acts." (p. 21)
Following her introduction, Knapp inserts a bibliography of twenty items in Russian and English dealing with the Petrashevsky Affair,
most of them focusing in Dostoevsky's role in it. One additional book that belongs in this list, but which was published too late for inclusion, is J.H. Seddon's Petrashevtsy: A Study of the Russian Revolutionaries of 1848 (Manchester, U.K. : Manchester University Press, 1985). Seddon emphasizes the revolutionary seriousness of the Petrashevtsy—to a much greater degree than do most Dostoevsky scholars, including Knapp. The documents translated by Knapp are presented in the following order; I have shortened the titles of some and have separated them into the three natural groupings implicitly chosen by Knapp: Dostoevsky's statement; his formal interrogation; his testimony from his own case; testimony from related cases; and his signed statement (Oct. 20, 1849) for the Military-Judicial Commission; the secret orders for Dostoevsky's arrest by the Third Department; excerpts from "Record of Persons Attending Petrashevskii's Friday Meetings..."; memorandum of the Chairman of the Commission ...; report by P.O. Antonelli (government informer); testimony of Dostoevsky's co-defendants; summary of defendants' testimony; excerpt from case of Dostoevesky; sentence of Military-Judicial Commission; decision of High Military Court; actual plan (approved by Nicholas I) for carrying out the verdict against the convicted conspirators. And finally: Dostoevsky's description of his arrest as entered in O.A. Miliukova's album; A.N. Maikov's letter to P.A. Viskovatov and the former's account of his implication in the Petrashevskii Affair, as recorded by A.A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov; and Dostoevsky's letters to his brother Mikhail of July 18, September 14 and December 22, 1849. An Appendix following the Documents offers two useful alphabetical listings: Identification of Persons Involved in the Case, and ideologies, Books and Documents. These are followed by Notes to the Documents. The English rendering of the documents is readable, with no translation problems discovered. My only objection to Knapp's book is that it does not give the exact titles of the original Russian documents, together with an indication of Knapp's exact sources. It seems obvious, however, that her basic source is Vol. 18 of F. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (1978) , which she lists in her bibliography. However, I could not find there the secret instructions approved by Nicholas I for rescinding the death sentences Donald M. Fiene University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Dostoevsky and the Human condition after a Century contains twenty essays presented at Hofstra University on April 9-11, 1981. The editors have assembled the papers into three parts, "Textual and Conceptual Interpretations," "Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies," and a middle part containing the keynote essay by Henry Peyre. The volume also contains the schedule for the conference and brief notes about each participant. The subdivisions according to approach are una-
voidably broad, since most speakers addressed aspects of Dostoevsky's work related to their own particular research interest. For this reason the title of the collection is not reflected in some of the chosen topics. The variety in background of the authors is at once a strength and a weakness: individual speakers may lack depth in interpreting Dostoevsky's world view, artistic technique, and separate works, while offering provocative and fruitful looks at his relevance for later writers. On the other hand, Pete Hamill's comments about Dostoevsky are generally on target while his introduction demonstrates how specious and elliptical links between Dostoevsky and the recent era can become.
Part One begins with Thelma Z. Lavine's critique, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor: The Death Struggle of Ideologies," an interpretation of Dostoevsky's view that socialism is a disorted form of Christianity. She concludes with a welcome defense of Western liberalism, the present forms of which Dostoevsky did not foresee. N. Norman Schneidman in "Murder and Suicide in The Brothers Karamazov : The Double Rebellion of Pavel Smerdiakov" summarizes Smerdiakov's explicit and implicit motives for parricide in The Brothers Karamazov, and places Smerdjakov in perspective as Ivan's dialogic partner. Shoshona M. Knapp in "The Dynamics of the Idea of Napoleon in Crime and Punishment" adopts a Bakhtinian approach to discussion of Napoleon in the novel and aptly characterizes Dostoevsky's polemical method. She discerns six different versions of the "great man's" right to transgress, showing how Raskol'nikov, Porfirii Petrovich, and Svidrigailov adopt and discard variants of this idea in the course of dialogue with one another. Asya Pekurovskaya's "The Nature of Referentiality in The Double," while patchy, tenuous, and confusing, nevertheless contains some intriguing remarks about the composition of The Double and the narrator's role in it. Much of the difficulty in reading her essay comes from her failure to adequately define important concepts, for example, "romantic" and "modern" codes of referentiality. Olga Matich in "The Idiot: A Feminist Reading" gives a detailed treatment of sex role inversion between the dominant women and submissive men of the novel, but does not address important tangential issues such as the relationship between tyrant and victim and the meaning of the violated icon in Dostoevsky's works. Dennis Patrick Slattery's "Narcissus Inverted: Fantastic Realism as a Way of Knowing in The Idiot" continues a theme about which he has often written. His treatment of doubling in the novel is somewhat subjective, however, and his interpretation of Dostoevsky's "fantastic realism" in the fantastic events of Idiot is circular and at times begs the question. Rado Pribic in "Notes from the Underground: One Hundred Years after the Author's Death" recounts the primary ideological and personal conflicts in the story but does not analyze them in detail, and his conclusion about human nature must be measured against Levine's more optimistic judgements. Roger Cox's treatment of suicide in "Kirillov, Stavrogin, and Suicide" is firmly grounded in textual evidence from both Dostoevsky's works and the New Testament. Particularly valuable are his comments on the Johannine and Pauline traditions relative to Dostoevsky's own interpretation of scripture. Reed Merrill relies upon Bakhtin's concept of dialogue in his "The Demon of Irony: Stavrogin the Adversary at Tihon's," but does not refer to Dostoevsky's polemic with Rousseau in his evaluation of Stavrogin's confession. Part One concludes with the essay of Vaija K. Ozolins, who shows how Dostoevsky's polemic with both utili-
tarians and advocates of "pure art" is reflected in the attitudes toward art of Stepan Trofimovich, Stavrogina, and Julia von Lembke. (She could easily have expanded this topic to include other references to beauty in the novel, for example, by the narrator and by Piotr Stepanovich.) Henry Peyre's keynote essay, "The French Face of Dostoevsky," makes up the whole of Part Two. While it is not specifically on Dostoevsky, it should interest scholars of French twentieth-century literature, in particular that of Andre Gide. In Part Three Patricia Flanagan Behrendt's "The Russian Iconic Representation of the Christian Madonna: A Feminine Archetype in Notes from Underground" provides convincing circumstantial evidence that Dostoevsky bases his portrayal of Liza on the Virgin of the Don and similar icons. Peter G. Christensen's "Dostoevsky and Jean-Luc Godard: Kirillov's Return in La Chinoise" is extremely appropriate for the collection, since it treats a conscious polemical adaptation of a Dostoevsky novel by a twentieth-century artist, who recodifies Dostoevsky's ideas about both art and the human condition in a different genre, namely the film. Julian W. Conolly argues in "Dostoevski and Vladimir Nabokov: The Case of Despair" that Nabokov's expressed antipathy for Dostoevsky's works disguises the positive influence he derived from Dostoevsky in works such as Despair. Dasha Culic Nisula explores a fascinating and important topic in "Dostoevsky and Richard Wright: From St. Petersburg to Chicago," yet her attempts to find parallels in storyline between Dostoevsky's and Wright's works lead her to some questionable judgments about Dostoevsky's worldview. Dennis Dircherl's "Dostoevsky and the Catholic Pax Romana" is largely a summation of Dostoevsky's anti-Catholic statements in his fiction and journalism, useful in its own right but not showing the same degree of textual interpretation as do Cox's works. Phyllis Berdt Kenevan's "Rebirth and the Cognitive Dream: From Dostoevsky to Hermann Hesse and C.G. Jung" is a heady synthesis of views about dreams by the three great thinkers. Her preoccupation with the collective unconscious (as advanced by Jung) prevents her from addressing Dostoevsky's stress upon the importance of the single faithful believer for changing the consciousness of humanity. Anthony S. Magistrale in "Between Heaven and Hell: The Dialectic of Dostoevsky's Tragic Vision" establishes fruitful parallels and contrasts between Dostoevskian, Spakespearean, and classical tragedy. Isabella Naginski herself recognizes the superlative nature of her essay, "Dostoevsky and George Sand: Two Opponents ot the Anthill," but her conjecture about the correspondence between Sand's Spiridon and Dostoevsky's later works is provocative, and she sets Dostoevsky's attitude toward Sand in context with those of his European contemporaries.
The weak points of the collection and its essays are those often found with interdisciplinary approaches. Particular authors may be insufficiently acquainted with Dostoevsky's biography or the cultural background of his works, or may not be aware of important related research. The strengths of the collection are more apparent, since the authors as a rule indicate useful strategies for interpreting Dostoevsky in a variety of contexts. Their research is a genuine service to Dostoevsky scholars who wish to broaden their interpretations of his fiction and his journalism.
Curt Whitcomb Michigan State University
Geir Kjetsaa. Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Writer's Life. Tr. from Norwegian by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff. New York: Viking, 1987. 437 pp. Cloth, 24.95
Given the rich store of biographical material and books on Dostoevsky, including Frank's monumental five-volume study in progress, it is indeed a brave endeavor to undertake a one-volume study of Dostoevsky's life. One must include Dostoevsky's most famous pronouncements from the journalism and letters, incorporate copious material from the reminiscences, give short analyses of the major works, and take positions on various controversial issues: Dostoevsky's relation to his father; the nature of his early political activities; the rumors about his rape of a young girl; and the time, nature, and effects of his particular form of epilepsy - among others things. But most important, one must put one's own stamp on the biography. A new biography, written after so many other biographies, should to some extent be an imaginative creation of its own, presenting us with a Dostoevsky who is somehow different from the Dostoevsky of previous biographies - even different from the Dostoevsky of our own imaginings. In Dostoevsky: A Writer's Life, Kjetsaa presents the factual record well and unmistakably gives us his own Dostoevsky. Kjetsaa does an admirable job on the young Dostoevsky, especially his childhood and his relationship with his parents. Of special note is his sympathetic treatment of Dostoevsky's father, who has often been presented as an ogre in the critical literature. As Kjetsaa comes to the later Dostoevsky, he cannot but repeat much of the material included in earlier biographies, such as Dostoevsky's pronouncements on literature, politics, and the Russian people. On the other hand, Kjetsaa makes much greater and more effective use of reminiscences than previous biographers, attempting to present Dostoevsky as much as possible as he was seen by others. In almost every reminiscence, we find detailed descriptions of Dostoevsky's physiognomy and general appearance. Depending on the observer, we learn that he was above, below, or average height; stocky or thin; younger or older looking than his years; brown- or gray-eyed; blond or brunette. The only thing most observers seemed to agree on was his low hoarse voice, a result of an early illness. On almost every page one encounters similarly interesting details -from Apollinariia Suslova's red braids to the colors of Dostoevsky's military uniforms. Perhaps Kjetsaa's best pages, however, are devoted to the analysis of Dostoevsky's gambling, which he interprets, following Dostoevsky's portrayal of Marmeladov's alcoholism, as Dostoevsky 's desire to punish himself and suffer; and the discussion of the markings in Dostoevksy's personal copy of the New Testament, especially the Gospel of St. John, which Kjetsaa sees as the key to understanding the underlying Christian ethic of much of Dostoevsky's fiction. To be sure, many of the analyses of the fictional works are brief, but this is good policy in a one-volume biography.
The major contribution, or deficiency, of Kjetsaa's biography lies less in the treatment of specific aspects of the life and artistic works than in its point of view. Kjetsaa's biography
is in many ways a modern saint's life. It is not at all that Kjetsaa glosses over the negative side of Dostoevsky's personality and political activities. He does not. He calls attention to the writer's biliousness, his intemperate behavior, his jealousy, his xenophobia, and his reactionary journalism -among other things. Yet in terms of proportion, the greater part of the book is devoted to the life of a great sinner, saved in the end and properly eulogized by Kjetsaa, his biographer-disciple, who performs much the same function for Dostoevsky that Alesha Karamzov performs for the one-time sinner Father Zosima, whose saint's life Alesha writes. The chapter titles are telling. We begin with the "Childhood and Boyhood" of the saint. The saint leaves the home of his parents and experiences a fall, nearly resulting in death, "At the Scaffold." He suffers in "Siberia." He returns home. But he is fated to leave once again after several "Years of Crisis." We read of his "Marriage and Flight," his "Exile," and his second return ("Back on Russian Soil"). Less than a decade later he is proclaimed "Prophet." The last chapter, "Triumph and Death," concludes with what amounts to a funeral oration, delivered, appropriately, by the young Vladimir Solov'ev. It is not surprising then that at the foundation of Kjetsaa's interpretation of events and works is the "good" Dostoevsky, the believing Christian and prophet of the holy Russian people and its universal Christian message of compassion and forgiveness. Kjetaa's portrayal of Dostoevsky's mother as an angel and his vindication (however objectively verifiable) of Dostoevsky's father as a stern, but basically loving and conscientious pater familias, fits in with the topoi of the Life. So are Kjetsaa's attempts to clear Dostoevsky of the guilt for his father's death that Freud ascribed to him, and the charges made by Strakhov and others regarding Dostoevsky's violation of a young girl. In Kjetsaa's hands, Notes from the House of the Dead becomes autobiographic fact, rather than imaginative reconstruction, and the narrator's last lines, in which he refers to his resurrection from the dead, is taken as applying to Dostoevsky himself. He also emphasizes the similarities between Myshkin and Dostoevsky, both physically, socially, and artistically - if not morally - and he not only identifies Shatov with Dostoevsky, "an idealized self-portrait of the author" (260) but proclaims Shatov the hero and martyr of the novel, who, because he challenges the forces of Satan, must "forfeit his earthly existence. But in return, on the day of judgment he will live and will receive admission to the millennium" (260). The chapter on The Possessed ends with Shatov's ringing encomium to the Russian people.
The treatment of Shatov may indicate the pitfalls of such an approach, especially when interpreting the literature in terms of biography and biography in terms of literature. For Shatov is not Dostoevsky, and he is certainly not "an idealized selfportrait of the author." Shatov does not believe in God, and his faith in the Russian people is built on a rather "shaky" foundation, the discarded abstract ideals of Kjetsaa's Satan -Nikolai Stavrogin. Shatov's "rebirth" at the end comes not as a result of a new faith in God or the people, but as a result of the miracle manifested in the forgiveness of his estranged wife and the birth of "their" child.
But I would guess that, in the end, one's estimate of Kjetsaa's biography of Dostoevsky will depend less on specific matters of interpretation than on one's own view of Dostoevsky. Those who see Dostoevsky as prophet and artist will read Kjetsaa's biography with pleasure. But even those who do not adhere to Kjetsaa's view of Dostoevsky will want to read this often stimulating biography. Gary Rosenshield University of Winsconsin-Madison
Robin Feuer Miller molds her collection of critical essays on the artist Dostoevsky into an artistic shape that is at once sensitive to the curves of Dostoevsky's chronological growth and to the widely ranging scholarly responses to the author. Critical Essays on Dostoevsky accomplishes the task of providing the reader with a running commentary on Dostoevsky's works, from Poor Folk through Brothers Karamazov. Critical Essays presents the reading public with a collection of essays by some of the finest scholars, worldwide, who have written on Dostoevsky. As a bonus, Miller includes comments by writers - Tolstoy, André Gide, Viacheslav Ivanov - who have spoken out on the subject of the great nineteenth-century Russian "seer of the soul." Miller's substantial introduction deftly and succinctly unfolds the story of the history of literary criticism on Dostoevsky from its inception in nineteenth-century Russia to the present. She follows the story through its intricate plot, in Russia, the Soviet Union, Western and Eastern Europe, and the United States. The essays edited by Miller range from the comfortably familiar classics of Dostoevsky criticism (Mochulsky's religio-formalist framework for Crime and Punishment; Donald Fanger's concentration on Dostoevsky's urban landscape; Ivanov's, Irving Howe's, Leonid Grossman's, and Joseph Frank's essays) to the new (Robert Jackson's incisive philosophical discussion of "The Peasant Marey"; Robert Belknap's provocative essay on suffering in Poor Folk; Jostein Bortnes' perceptive analysis of hagiogography in relation to Dostoevsky's characterization of Alesha Karamzov; Miller's own important study of the "two readers" within the reader of The Idiot).
The discussions brought together in Critical Essays present a variety of perspectives from which to consider Dostoevsky. In an excerpt from Freedom and the Tragic Life Viacheslav Ivanov draws an analogy between Dostoevsky's novels and Greek tragedy. Joseph Frank, in his famous essay, "Nihilism and Notes from Underground," applies the historical method to his reading of Dostoevsky. Leonid Grossman addresses the question of Stavrogin's confession by placing it in the context of Dostoevsky's previous works and in the context of other relevant written confessions -literary (George Sand's Confession d'une jeune fille; Frederic Soulié's novel Confession genérale; Alfred De Musset's novel
Confession d'un enfant du siècle; Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater); autobiographical (Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Les Confessions; historical (Proudhon's Confessions of a Revolutionary); and religious (St. Augustine's Confessions). Barbara Howard focuses her critical lenses on the specifics of Notes from Underground's convergences with and divergences from Rousseau's Confessions. Irving Howe approaches Dostoevsky's Possessed from a stance that is at once psychological (his attention to the all-important presence of buffoonery in that novel) and political (his concern with the ideological issues of liberalism, utopianism, and rebellion that play themselves out in The Possessed). John Jones offers close textual readings of passages from the 1846 and 1866 versions of The Double, skillfully incorporating them into his discussion of that novel's place in Dostoevsky's oeuvre. Arpad Kovacs ponders the generic nature of Myshkin's story, its elements of the "sentimental idyll" (Miller, page 120) and juxtaposes them to elements of the "political idyll" (Miller, page 124) presented in The Idiot. Order and structure, in narrative lines and in thematics, form the core of Malcolm Jones' illuminating article on A Raw Youth. Questions of narrative are central to the arguments presented in Victor Terras' astute comments on Brothers Karamazov and James Michael Holquist's interesting piece on "A Gentle Creature" and "Dream of a Ridiculous Man." Anthropological insights based on the ideas of scholars such as Mary Douglas inform Gary Saul Morson's intelligent reading of Brothers Karamazov, and Bakhtin's perspective on Dostoevsky is central to Caryl Emersons's good "prefatory comments on [Bakhtin's] 'Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book'" (page 243). An excerpt from Bakhtin's reflections on his Dostoevsky book follow. Sven Linnér turns his attention to moral questions as he discusses Father Zossima. R.P. Blackmur, in his 1964 essay on Brothers Karamazov, addresses moral issues that concern Dostoevsky's portrayal of Ivan, Alesha, and Dmitri. Soviet scholar V.E. Vetlovskaia follows the rhythm and significance of argumentation within the artistic structure of Brothers Karamazov. This book by Robin Miller, a major Dostoevsky scholar of the younger generation of American Slavists, is an outstanding contribution to Dostoevsky scholarship. The general reading public and specialists in the field of Russian studies are indeed fortunate that Miller's sensitive, intelligent, knowledgeable mind has given shape to the volume entitled Critical Essays. Ellen Chances Princeton University |
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